dissonance blog for Eng 701

As a nurse, I read professional journal articles and published studies of medical and nursing research. Nursing research has been criticized as not true research because it is largely ethnographic, descriptive and philosophical. Nursing research is more often about people, their lived experience, rather than controlled trials of some form of treatment. Is it still research and when written, is it rhetoric?

As a graduate student, I will conduct my own research on a topic and develop a thesis. I will need to document and write about my research. As I have stated before, I have not studied composition since the 1980’s, but I have been “instructed” to the appropriate way of writing a research paper. Nursing at UNLV follows the American Psychological Association formula for writing a paper, and, more importantly, documenting the resources referenced in the body of work. Does this make it good composition?

According to the readings we have been doing and about which we have been blogging, scientific writing is a form or mode of discourse called descriptive, narrative or explanatory. Sometimes it is persuasive if the aim of the paper is to promote the treatment or medication based on the statistical success. The research may promote a theory by which other researchers can conduct their research to prove a hypothesis.

Scientific writing is supposed to fit the definition of objective and non-personal (The aim of the early twentieth century writing teachers in the “new College”). This is difficult to do if the study is descriptive.

Since I have been in this course, I have become interested in the various types of writing and curious about how technical writing fits into the concept of rhetoric. I think it will be interesting to discover (or at least review) the types of scientific writings such as random controlled trials, prospective and retrospective studies and other nursing research for the composition styles. Dr. Jablonski has given me some direction as to authors that have reviewed scientific writing, such as Greg Myers’ Writing Biology which, I understand is an analysis of the papers written by two researchers and their efforts to get their papers published. I also want to try to find some information on the writings of Florence Nightingale, the first Nurse researcher. Her contributions to mathematics and statistics gained her a fellowship in the Royal Statistical Society (1858) and The American Statistical Association (1874). It was this work that got the attention of the officials to pay heed to what she cited as the cause of illness and death in the military hospitals in Turkey. She clashed with the military officials, so she went over their heads. She is seen, by some, as a meddlesome, power-hungry socialite who used her Father’s money and influence with the Royal Court to get her way she was also considered a “Feminist Liberal” before the phrase existed. Her writings are from the times we have been reading (the 1850’s through the early 1900’s) I would be curious as to the influence of that era on her writing.

So what will I research for this class? Perhaps the technical writing style of Florence Nightingale compared to present scientific writing? Has it changed? Does anyone care? Nursing has changed and so has the type and volume of research being done. Perhaps researching the various technical purposes of writing for nurses would be more interesting. This is what is being read by nurses today.

Another aspect is technology. Nurses are using communication technology in the hospitals and offices and in the area of education. Many hospitals are using Electronic medical records for interdepartmental communications and nurses need to be savvy with this technology. There is even a specialty of Nursing informatics that involves understanding and being able to use and teach others to use the technology required in a facility. I am also curious to see if more research results are going to be published directly to websites of the researchers rather than wait to be accepted by the various professional journals. If so, how will they be peer reviewed? Will the use of websites change the way research is written and documented? I guess this will be the new Genre of research.

Nurses and nurse educators are using computers to document patient care and PDA’s for resource information at the bedside and in the classroom. There are many programs that make information on medications and the latest treatment modalities available at the fingertips of the nurse and the student. Does this composition style have a name or is it simply another genre of explanatory discourse? I am curious if websites are evaluated for their composition. I know they are evaluated for their accuracy and biases and required to adhere to specific regulations and guidelines developed by the federal government i.e.) Section 515 of the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2001: Public Law 106-554, "Guidelines for Ensuring and Maximizing the Quality Objectivity, Utility, and Integrity of Information Disseminated by Federal Organizations" http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/reqs_bestpractices/laws_regs/info_quality.shtml

The more I think about this project, the more I am inclined to look at the writings of Florence Nightingale and compare them to the writings of modern day nurse researchers. I am open to suggestions as to the interests of the class.

I would not want to bore anyone with a dry technical writing topic.

blog for 3/03/08 all about the process

The first three articles from Villanueva discussed various aspects of teaching/learning writing. Murray promotes teaching the process of writing, not the product, to evaluate the student’s effort and not worry if the product is ever finished. Teach the process of brining language to life (or life to language). He discusses three stages of writing as prewriting, writing and rewriting and feels that 85% of time is spent in prewriting stage. “The amount of time the writer spends in each stage depends on his personality, his work habits, is maturity as a craftsman and the challenge of what he is trying to say” (4).
He illustrates ten implications for teaching the process which are student focused and process oriented. The student is to be rewarded for the effort put into the process with recommendations for improving the product. He feels that grades stop the process, the same way publication does. The student needs to be allowed to take the time necessary for the creativeness to emerge, with some thought about deadlines but not about how the final piece will be evaluated as correct or incorrect.
Murray speaks with authority, succinctly and to the point. I found his essay easy to read and understand and have no trouble agreeing with him. I can see how this is a very dynamic process, but never having studies or taught “language arts”, I cannot say how it would work. I will be interested in the opinions of others.
Emig follows this with a discussion about writing as a form of learning. She see writing as distinctly unique and corresponding uniquely to powerful learning strategies.
Her discussion includes aspects of philosophy, psychology and neuro functioning of the brain to emphasize her point that by writing, we use more of our brains and therefore, reinforce learning. We learn by seeing, doing and symbology (of language) using the hand, the eye, and the brain. “Writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain. A slower process, it utilizes our thoughts to past, present and future. She makes comparisons between learning strategies and selected attributes of writing. She does not say where these strategies were developed. I would assume from one of the language theorists she references, like Viytosky. Luria or Brunner. I feel her analogy is a little “self serving” but she presents an interesting concept and promotes some interesting questions for research.
As a visual and “hands-on” learner, I would tend to agree with her concept that learning to write is best learned by writing (regardless of what is written?) I suppose that the act that we are using “blogs” for presenting our thoughts, that this is an exercise in leaning to write by public writing.
The following two essays by Perl and Sommers were on the comparison of the process of writing of unskilled college students and experienced writers. The first, a study of the composing process and the second on the revision process of the students and writers. Sondra Perl discusses her study of observing students as they write. She developed a tool and coding system to make observable and measurable behaviors in the composing process. I won’t discuss her entire study, just her findings which indicate that 1) students edited frequently for grammatical and other errors, yet still made mistakes. 2) Their editing was superficial and not a reworking of ideas and was disruptive to their thought processes.
These concepts were almost repeated by Sommers. Her study looked at revision of papers by students vs. experienced writers and her findings, I feel, strongly mirror Perl’s study.
The importance of these studies reflects on the processes discussed by the first two articles. It is interesting to me that looking at the way in which students compose their pieces could affect the way teachers expect them to learn. It seems that students write with a methodological approach that has already been ingrained and would need to be changed before new teaching/learning theories are presented. They are writing with evaluation in mind instead of their creativity. The students will need to learn that the teachers are respectful of their creativity more than their lexical, syntactic and grammatical choices.
The Hillock meta-analysis provided an interesting reflexion on the previous article/essays. Through meta-analysis, Mr. Hillock and colleagues review the studies done on experimental treatment for teaching writing over a 19 year period.
The analysis of these studies discovered that none of the most used or favored teaching strategies of that time were effective, and yet that is how students were taught to write. My question is; did the teachers know that their methods weren’t effective or were the strategies not studied well enough to make a determination? According to Hillock, the researchers of that time were against using experimental teaching studies to define and revise teaching strategies. As he quotes Graves (1980) “this research wasn’t readable and was of limited value. It couldn’t help teachers in the classroom. Experimental research is written for other researchers, promotion or dusty archives in language guaranteed for self-extinction”... Teachers cannot transfer the data to the students they teach.
Hillocks challenges, that, if this is true, then there should be little in common among these strategies and they should be studied for that very reason.
The results of this meta-analysis reveled that the most favored teaching strategy (the presentational mode) is not the recommended strategy by the National Writing Project (the natural process mode) and neither of these strategies are the most effective.
The most effective mode seemed to be the environmental mode that “brings together the student, teacher and materials more nearly into balance and takes advantage of all the resources of the classroom” (160). This mode encourages high levels of student involvement, problem solving, using expert examples of good writing and allows students to interact with each other. Many of the traditional methods of teaching writing that were used as experimental treatment studies showed less than effective results. The researchers developed several research questions that, I presume have yet to be answered. The focus of instruction and the mode of instruction together give rise to many other areas for study according to Hillocks. So then, why has the teaching of writing not changed and still includes a focus on grammar and use of language and the mode of instruction is on the use of models and free writing in many schools? I have to admit my ignorance, again. I have not studied the theories that prevail in teaching writing, I am making assumptions from our readings that there has not been a method or strategy developed that can be identified as “the most effective” I also presume as we continue in the “discovery” that we will be able to make our own assertions as to the “best practice”.
This article was helpful to me, even though I did not understand all of the jargon and philosophy discussed, because it gave me a glimpse into the technical features of writing that I have not been exposed to. I was able to understand the concepts and application of the various researchers that we have been reading about from the perspective and insights of other authors. I guess time will tell with whom I agree or disagree.