Nursing

Nursing

As a nurse embarking on an advanced degree, you are developing the characteristics of a scholar-practitioner, which includes strong communication skills. Writing in a scholarly manner involves supporting your thoughts with evidence from the literature and appropriately using APA formatting.

One of the challenges of scholarly writing is paraphrasing the thoughts of others in your work. Paraphrasing, and correctly citing the original author for his or her ideas, allows you to take the ideas of others, summarize them, and incorporate them into your own writing. When summarizing the ideas of others, it is important to avoid plagiarizing (copying the words and ideas of others as though they were your own). In addition to expanding your knowledge of APA, this week’s Learning Resources help you to distinguish between paraphrasing and plagiarizing. Nursing

To prepare:

• Think about the sometimes subtle difference between plagiarizing and paraphrasing.
• Read the following paragraphs, which were written by Patricia O’Conner:

A good writer is one you can read without breaking a sweat. If you want a workout, you don’t lift a book—you lift weights. Yet we’re brainwashed to believe that the more brilliant the writer, the tougher the going.

The truth is that the reader is always right. Chances are, if something you’re reading doesn’t make sense, it’s not your fault—it’s the writer’s. And if something you write doesn’t get your point across, it’s probably not the reader’s fault—it’s yours. Too many readers are intimidated and humbled by what they can’t understand, and in some cases that’s precisely the effect the writer is after. But confusion is not complexity; it’s just confusion. A venerable tradition, dating back to the ancient Greek orators, teaches that if you don’t know what you’re talking about, just ratchet up the level of difficulty and no one will ever know. Nursing

Don’t confuse simplicity, though, with simplemindedness. A good writer can express an extremely complicated idea clearly and make the job look effortless. But such simplicity is a difficult thing to achieve because to be clear in your writing you have to be clear in your thinking. This is why the simplest and clearest writing has the greatest power to delight, surprise, inform, and move the reader. You can’t have this kind of shared understanding if writer and reader are in an adversary relationship. (pp. 195–196)

Source: O’Conner, P. (2003). Woe is I: The grammarphobe’s guide to better English in plain English. New York: Riverhead Books.

• Paraphrase this passage from O’Conner using no more than 75–100 words. Remember that paraphrasing means summarizing the essence of the original text. It does not mean creating a thesaurus-based revision of the author’s original words or copying the piece, or any part of it, word for word. For this activity, do not use any direct quotes.
• Turn your paraphrase into Grammarly and SafeAssign.
• Review your reports.
• Review the other tools, resources, and services available to you through the Walden Writing Center that support your growth as a scholarly writer.
• Consider which of these resources you find to be most useful.
• Review learning resources on APA formatting rules and information within the Walden Writing Center on APA Nursing

Post a description of your experience of using Grammarly and SafeAssign and share at least one insight you gained about paraphrasing and avoiding plagiarism as a matter of academic integrity.  Recommend at least one other online resource that supports scholarly writing, and explain your rationale. Lastly, share two APA formatting rules with the class and a specific page number in the APA manual where this rule can be located

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The following guidelines are followed by most faculty members on most Walden coursework. 1. Font: Use a 12-point serif font, such as Garamond, Times Roman, or Palatino. Titles, headings, and table titles and copy should also appear in the same 12- point type. 2. Spacing: Double-space all of your work. Per APA’s revised 6th edition, you may insert either one space or two spaces after a period. 3. Margins and page numbers: All margins should be 1″ from the edge of the paper. Page numbers go in the upper right corner, 1″ down and 1″ in from the edge of the paper. The first line of text should start 1.5″ down. (Note: MS Word defaults the first line of text at 1″.) 4. Italics: Use italics, not underlines. APA does not allow bold type except in headings, tables and figures. 5. Punctuation: The APA nuance most commonly missed by students follows: In a series of three or more nouns or noun phrases, you must insert a comma before the word and or or, as in the following examples: bacon, lettuce, and tomato; Tom, Dick, or Harry; eating lunch, going to the gym, and then going home. Use a semicolon to combine two independent clauses or to separate elements of a list that contain a comma, as in the above example. Add an apostrophe + s for possessives of names: Smith’s; Jones’s. Do not hyphenate most prefixes: semistructured, nondenominational, multimedia, antisocial. 6. Capitalization and spelling: Do not capitalize job titles unless immediately preceding a person’s name: the superintendent, but Superintendent Williams; the president of the school board; Vice President Agnew. Use a lowercase letter after a colon unless introducing a complete sentence. Nursing

In general, do not hyphenate words with prefixes: pretest, posttest, antidiscrimination, bilingual, codependent, multinational, underserved, overextended.