Writing in Nursing
There are many different types of writing in nursing, some that I found are experiential narrative, argument paper, portfolio, concept or nursing process mapping, correspondence, research paper, and charting.  Narrative writing is telling a personal story, an argument paper is trying to make a point while also stating another, the portfolio will be used to evaluate nurses, concepts help nurses view relationships among clinical data and to apply theory (George).  Correspondence is about writing a letter versus writing a memo, research paper is self explanatory, and charting can include communicating information, assisting evaluation, and providing a legal record (George).  Weather you are going to be a nurse or not it is important to know how to site sources; on Lynchburg College's web site is dedicated to helping nurses cite sources in their writing.  They believe that all citations must include surnames of the authors and the date of the source document. Also that direct quotes should be kept to a minimum, if the quote is more than five lines then you should indent five spaces for each line.  Your paper will look more credible if the sources come from published books and journal rather than newspapers and magazines (Lynchburg).  Writing is essential to nursing for a number of different reasons.  Patient care, issues of nursing liability, and the learning of different nursing skills are all depend upon writing as a tool and source of communication(Romberger).  Writing also occurs in the forms of nurses' notes, clinical studies, and scholarly research (Romberger).  Much has been written about the role the writing plays in the development of student nurses into professionals.  There is a bibliography on OWL which is an online writing lab site and it is intended to be a starting place for people interested in using writing in their courses or as a resource for those who are already using writing in their courses but are looking for new ways to implement its use.  I found it useful with help in this project, so if you teacher makes you do a writing project this site will help (owl.english.purdue.edu).                     

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