A Guide to Scholarly Writing in Nursing

Scholarly writing is the standard format of expressing and sharing detailed ideas in academia. It has a tradition stretching back to the 1600s. The initial goal for academic writing was to ensure proper attribution of ideas to those who conceptualized them. Nowadays standardization of academic writing makes it easy for ideas to be shared across the globe and the approach to this is largely similar across academic fields, including nursing.

Nursing students and professional nurses pursuing postgraduate education have to write papers like research projects, case studies and essays. The papers are completed in order to demonstrate in depth understanding of a topic or share novel ideas for the purpose of passing a class or getting published in journal publications. The process for the latter is much more rigorous as it requires a nurse to pass the review of an editor and his or her peers to get featured in such a publication. A lot more goes into it than the quality of ideas because the number of submissions made by others in nursing education far outweighs the spots for nursing journal article publication.

This fact makes it critical that a nurse develops a habit of consistently producing world class academic nursing writings. It is not always possible to have time to meet this objective. This makes it practically a-must to resort to professional academic nursing writing services such as those we offer as Nursingwritingservices.com. </span >

The types of scholarly papers written in nursing may be different but they all test nursing students on the same four competencies. A nursing student is required to demonstrate that he or she excels in descriptive writing, analytical writing, persuasive writing and critical writing. Skills in these types of writing manifest individually or in combination.

Descriptive writing requires a student or registered nurse to demonstrate competency in detailing facts. It is used in scholarly writing to explain methods of data collection, analysis and share results of such an exercise. Descriptive writing trains the author to be objective as he or she is only detailing observations and that is relevant because objectivity is a required attribute for a successful nursing career.

Analytical writing requires more out of the author. A student will be required to highlight relationships between variables. This requires critical thinking skills to evaluate matters beyond the superficial level. In scholarly writing, an instance where analytical writing comes into play is when discussing the results of a research undertaking.

Persuasive and Critical writing are practically the same. They test the writer on his or her analytical and descriptive writing skills while prompting them to include their own views. So, what is the difference between the two? Persuasive writing requires the writer to only argue out his or her own view as is done in essays. Critical writing tests the writer’s ability to not only argue out his or her own views but also hold them in light of objective evaluation of the views of other authors.

Scholarly writing in nursing emphasizes correct format as intention is to make ideas easily shareable across cultures. This is why scholarly writing is predominantly done in one language. This is not the only standardization that nursing students will have to adhere to. Despite the variety of academic nursing papers, they will all generally have a similar guideline on how to structure the way information is presented. Each bit of information has to go in the correct section otherwise the paper will not be considered a good one. The sections that make up practically all academic papers in nursing are:

1. Title
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. Literature Review
5. Conclusion and Recommendations
6. References

There is a slight difference between case studies and research papers on what follows the Literature Review. The latter has the Method, Result and Discussion sections that go into detail on data collection and analysis techniques plus relationships that become evident from the exercise. The former has the Critical Analysis section that provides space for the author to develop his or her arguments on a case study based on evidence observed, of course.

What should go into the other sections? Students are not always sure and end up mixing up information and thus clouding clarity of information presented in their paper. We will briefly go through each section to inform you on what to write the next time you have an academic nursing writing assignment.

Title: The Title is supposed to specifically describe contents of the paper. This means that it should contain all important elements that capture what the paper is about such that an individual who will opt not to read the paper understands what it is about. In the same vein, the Title of a scholarly writing in nursing should never be a teaser. Abstract: The Abstract is another summary section of a scholarly paper. But it is only written after the other sections have been completed. This is because it summarizes the purpose, findings and conclusion of the paper. Background information and citations should never be in the Abstract but Keywords should be present.

Introduction: The Introduction is the section where background information provides context for writing the paper. The problem should be well identified plus goals and justification for solving it. Nursing students should desist from making the Introduction section too long.

Literature Review: This is arguably the section that most individuals in nursing education have a problem writing. The Literature Review indeed tests whether you have a good grasp on scholarly writing. It is supposed to be the section where the author critically evaluates research that has been done around his or her chosen topic. The sources should be authoritative, the extent of citation should be wide yet relevant and both similar and different ideas should be assessed by the author. Unfortunately, many nursing students reduce this section to a chronological listing of past research.

Conclusion and Recommendation: This is a space for the author to include his or her own views. But they must be logically developed from preceding material in the paper. And new ideas should never be introduced when concluding the paper otherwise clarity of information will be lost.

References: This is the final part of scholarly writing. It credits the sources of information that an author has utilized to express his ideas. Failure to properly attribute work is ground for plagiarism, which is right about the worst thing one can do in scholarly writing. The technique used to reference, cite and even organize scholarly writing in nursing is the American Psychological Association (APA) style.