Get Ready, Get Set, Write! Foundations of Effective, Anti-Ageist Writing

Abstract

Effective writing is the sum of a balanced calculation. To write effectively requires that authors know their subject, understand their audience, and portray their message to achieve greater good. Puzzlingly, effective writing is a skill frequently downplayed or misrepresented throughout nursing. Our very identity is tied to relationships and communication. We nurses should love to write but most often do not. It is time to replace our paradoxical distaste for writing with confidence and skill. We gerontological nurses need to add our writing voices to the global campaign to end ageism as we strive to improve health, well-being and healthcare for older people and their care partners. That means we cannot afford to be ambivalent about our writing!

Nurses fretting about writing always feel ironic to me. Here are professionals who can talk about someone's most intimate concerns with ease, whose savvy assessments and interventions restore function, create comfort and save lives. But sit down and write something that they can happily share with colleagues and the public? The very thought quashes all confidence for many of us. Added to this stressful pressure is the implicit social obligation that we, as gerontological nurses, hold to actively dismantle ageism. The World Health Organisation underscores that education and policy are two of the three primary means to combat ageism (World Health Organization 2021). In our hands, effective writing becomes a tool with a dual purpose. We can achieve our primary aim in writing—whether that be a research report for submission to the International Journal of Older People Nursing (IJOPN), a policy for our workplace, or a blog for our community—and take down ageism at the same time.

Like any skill we learn as nurses, effective writing is achievable given the right circumstances. Any writing task needs a clearsighted approach, a context conducive to the writing task, useful resources, a specific plan, and dedicated practice. Undertaking writing in a haphazard or disjointed way will deliver disappointing or frustrating results in the same way that nursing care undertaken in the same fashion returns patient dissatisfaction or worse. Likening writing to our more familiar world of clinical nursing care allows us to successfully realise effective writing, making it an integral part of our professional repertoire.

As an experienced nurse, author, peer reviewer and editor, I know that belief and self-confidence are keys to writing success. We need to believe that writing is a necessary part of our professional skill set. Imagining that writing is ‘not our thing’ strips away our scope and our power to do good. After all, if we aim to improve health and well-being and advance social and health care, then we need to educate varied public and professional audiences through our writing to achieve those changes. Once we believe that writing is an integral nursing skill, we need to view writing as a skill we can acquire like any other skill. Becoming effective writers requires us to use our experiences acquiring nursing skills to our best advantage. We know that building knowledge, using the right tools and practicing a skill consistently leads to success.

Many things that support writing success are realistically beyond my reach as an editor. I cannot make any aspiring nurse author dedicate time and effort to practice their writing, for example. But I can provide guidance to sharpen one's approach, recommend useful tools, offer my top tips for what to do and what to avoid when writing, and lay out strategies that return results when consistently applied. Here are some of my truly favourite tips, strategies and resources that I recommend to any nurse aiming to make their writing more effective. These suggestions are grouped by the aspect of writing they support—approach, context, tools, planning and action.

The value of our approach to writing cannot be overestimated. I worry that colleagues frequently set themselves up for frustration when writing by not clarifying their approach. For instance, I believe we should not casually append adjectives like good or great to our identity as a writer. If writing is a skill to be developed, then it must feel achievable to all, as with any skill that is necessary to professional nursing. Some writers are more skillful or comfortable with the process than others, but everyone can achieve effective writing given requisite knowledge, resources and skill building. Judging the value of our writing as part of our identity only overwhelms us. Instead, use an approach where you reflect on what you have achieved in writing that day and look to the next day for opportunities to improve on the prior day's achievements.

We need to place ourselves in a context conducive to the task of writing to produce what we wish to write. That context includes a variety of factors familiar to us as gerontological nurses. We need a space where we can write with access to tools that may include pen and paper as well as a computer and access to the internet. Handwriting our thoughts on paper, particularly as we start a writing project, slows us down so we can think more clearly about what we want our message to be and how we plan to argue it. We also need to be in a supportive interpersonal environment with colleagues who support our writing and believe in our success. That means we want to select co-investigators, co-authors and writing partners (colleagues whom we write our own projects alongside one another) with care. To facilitate such relationships, Phillippi and colleagues offer a valuable description of best practices for collaboration along with a useful authorship grid (Phillippi et al. 2018). For me, Phillippi and colleagues underscore that writing effectively begins before anything is written on the page. Creating an authorship agreement that explicitly specifies roles and responsibilities is essential to writing effectively as a team.

Approach, context and resources in hand, we are ready to formulate a plan for any writing project. Planning a writing project includes identifying the audience, venue, and format. For example, writers wanting to reach a global gerontological nursing audience with their research report would consider IJOPN as a venue to reach their desired audience. Those same authors wrote for a different audience when they proposed that research. Peers are always the audience for research proposals. Conversely, a gerontological nurse aiming to reach a lay audience with a message about emergency preparedness for older members of a community would consider media outlets in that community, particularly newspapers and websites read by their target audience. Audience and venue emerge from understanding the message we plan to convey in what we write.

Formats for writing are tied to the venue where what you write will appear. Research proposals are formatted in a manner widely described by many university libraries and in a variety of publications. Nurses Sandelowski and Barroso authored a classic paper anatomising the qualitative research proposal which is worth reading even if you are not interested in qualitative research (Sandelowski and Barroso 2003). Whatever the general form of the research proposal in nursing, many funding agencies are shifting their requirements for proposals to shorter, more responsive formats. Following the selected funding agency guidelines is essential to writing an effective proposal.

Most research reports, along with quality improvement manuscripts, use the introduction, methods, results and discussion (IMRAD) format (Sollaci and Pereira 2004). IMRAD is a form of expository writing. Periodically reviewing the Purdue OWL pages on expository writing (https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/essay_writing/expository_essays.html), thesis statements (https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/thesis_statement_tips.html), and paragraph structure (https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/paragraphs_and_paragraphing/index.html) is helpful for seasoned and novice writers alike. But, like funding agencies, journals may amend the IMRAD format, specify the presence and format of the abstract, and set word limits. Carefully reviewing the guidelines for authors for the journal to which you plan to submit your manuscript is essential. For example, here are the IJOPN guidelines for authors (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17483743/homepage/forauthors.html) where you can see what types of manuscripts we accept and the associated requirements for abstracts and word count.

Lay publications like newspapers, magazines and websites that publish work from authors are more idiosyncratic in their format preferences. Searching for the guidelines on the types of written work accepted and the format preferred by any publication is crucial. Avoid simply sending what you have written to the blog, journal, magazine or media outlet you think should publish it. Then reach out with a query letter to the editorial office. Spend time thinking about what message you are conveying, whom you want to reach, and what you want that audience to do with what you are writing. How you answer those questions about content, audience, and action becomes the guideposts for what you are writing.

The audience, venue, and format decided, we are ready to write. My advice here is to begin as you mean to go on. That means creating a document that uses the format and style required by the venue. Do not fall into the trap of simply starting to write. This tactic lends itself to a mess of words on the page that then needs lots of time to sort out. Open the new document, select the style from your reference manager, and then develop an outline using the format determined by the combination of your audience and the selected venue. Include the word count limit in the document and use it as a metric for the depth of argument and length of sections. Keep in mind that a word count implies both a minimum and maximum count when both are not stated. That means that writing a manuscript that falls well below or far above that number is unlikely to be successful.

I hope that my review of the foundations of effective, anti-ageist writing has offered you some new ideas to enhance your own writing. IJOPN exists because gerontological nurse authors and their colleagues around the world take the time and energy to write effectively, preparing manuscripts reporting their original research, systematic reviews, commentaries and reviews of books and media. With the new ideas and review of resources here, I like to imagine that current authors will find that suggestion or strategy that makes a difference in their writing and that authors who have not yet considered sending one of their manuscripts to IJOPN will be inspired to do so. For now, I encourage you to get ready and set to write as I wish you all enjoyable, successful writing! I look forward to reading your work. And, as always, share what you are writing, reading, and thinking about with us on the IJOPN social media feeds. We are on LinkedIn at https://uk.linkedin.com/in/international-journal-of-older-people-nursing-ijopn-10bb6674 and on Blue Sky at https://bsky.app/profile/intjnlopn.bsky.social. And, as a reminder, the IJOPN Facebook page will close soon, so now is the time to change how you follow the journal. Now, get ready, get set, write!

The author declares no conflicts of interest.