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Logical Fallacies as a Possible Source of Misconceptions and Inadequate Patient Recommendations Given by Medical Professionals – A Preliminary Review

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Abstract
The aim of this article was to prepare a basis for further quantitative research concerning the nutritional knowledge of medical professionals (doctors) and dieticians in view of the accuracy of dietary recommendations given to patients. For this purpose, a review of literature data in thi…

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Why a writing guide for nursing? If you hated writing essays in high school or college and think you made an escape by going into nursing where you would work only with your heart and hands; think again. The ability to write well is an essential skill to succeed in almost any field, including nursing. Nurses write documentations, clinical notes and journals about their patients, care plans, interviews, etc. Besides writing as part of nursing practice, contributing to the knowledge base in your discipline or communicating to advocate for better health care, or for better funding, and more...are all good reasons to learn to write well.

Some common nursing essay types include:

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Library: Writing in Your Discipline: Writing for Nursing

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Library: Writing in Your Discipline: Writing for Nursing

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​​​​About the Journal

The American Journal of Nursing is the oldest and most honored broad-based nursing journal in the world. Peer-reviewed and evidence-based, it is considered the profession's premier journal. AJN adheres to journalistic standards that require transparency of real and potential conflicts of interests that authors, editors, and reviewers may have. It follows publishing standards set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE; www.icmje.org), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME; www.wame.org), and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE; http://publicationethics.org/).

AJN welcomes submissions of evidence-based clinical application papers and descriptions of best clinical practices, original research and QI reports, case studies, narratives, commentaries, and other manuscripts on a variety of clinical and professional topics. The journal also welcomes submissions for its various departments and columns, including artwork and poetry that is relevant to nursing or health care. Guidelines on writing for specific departments- Art of Nursing, Viewpoint, Policy, and Politics, and Reflections-are available at http://AJN.edmgr.com.

AJN's mission is to promote excellence in nursing and health care through the dissemination of evidence-based, peer-reviewed clinical information and original research, discussion of relevant and controversial professional issues, adherence to the standards of journalistic integrity and excellence, and promotion of nursing perspectives to the health care community and the public.

AJN has garnered numerous awards for excellence in editing and dissemination over the past decade, including several award-winning series on focused topics (see Award Winners below)

AJN is the only broad-based nursing journal indexed in ISI's Journal Citation Report, with an Impact Factor of 2.577, and a ranking of 42/124 among nursing journals.

AJN is currently indexed in:

Academic OneFile

Allied and Complementary Medicine Databases (AMED)

British Nursing Index

CINAHL

Current Contents: Social and Behavioral Sciences

EBSCO

EMBASE

HINARI

Index to Scientific Reviews

JournalGuide

JSTOR

International Pharmaceutical Abstracts

MEDLINE

OVID

ProQuest

PubMed

SCImago

Scopus

Social Sciences Citation Index

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The American Journal of Nursing, the profession’s premier journal, promotes excellence in the nursing and healthcare profession. Subscribe today!

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This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

Writing as a Professional Nurse
Summary:
These resources will help you write on the job and in the classes you will take to become a nurse.

"Writing as a Professional Nurse" provides three general, though important, rules working nurses should keep in mind while writing reports and charts and while communicating with doctors and patients.

"Writing in the Field" discusses three examples of writing tasks nurses perform: flowcharts, careplans, and narratives.

"List of Nursing Resources" provides links to Purdue OWL resources that both nurses and nursing students might find helpful while writing for work or school. Each link provides a brief description of the resource and how and why it will help nurses and students with their writing tasks.

The field of nursing requires a great deal of swift, accurate writing. You will need to fill out reports and charts correctly and completely and record your interactions with doctors and patients fairly. In addition, you must always be prepared to defend the information you record. The material below is intended to help you get used to this type of writing both in school and in the field of nursing.

Three General Rules

Be Precise

This may seem to go without saying, but you should remember that accuracy is important even beyond the obvious areas like medication administration and treatment procedure. Accurately reporting sequences of events, doctor's orders, and patient concerns will protect you from scrutiny.

Example: "Did dressing change."

If this is the entire record of you performing a dressing change for a patient, then exactly what you did is up to interpretation. A more precise version would be:

"Performed dressing change, cleaned wound with NS and gauze, applied calcium alginate, covered with ABD, secured with silk tape. Patient tolerated well."

This revision provides a clear picture of every step of the procedure and explains use of all materials. (Note: even further explanation may be necessary to describe wound status and any changes or doctor notifications.)

Be Objective

Always try to remove personal emotions and opinions from the writing you do. Place yourself in a dispassionate mindset and record information, not feelings, hunches, or viewpoints.

Example: "Patient acting crazy."

This statement relies on the nurse's subjective opinion of the patient's mental state. A better version would be:

"Patient pacing back and forth, breathing fast, clenching fists, yelling 'Don't touch me!' repeatedly."

This provides a clear picture of what actually happened during the incident, allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Remember Your Critical Audience

Litigation and auditing are a fact of life in the medical field, and chances are good that readers of your writing will be actively looking for mistakes or inconsistencies. Scrupulous charting and reporting is the best way to satisfy such readers.

Examples: "Did dressing change." "Patient acting crazy."

Both of the examples in the above points could be used by a critical audience to have cause for correction or could be used negatively against you in court. The phrase "Did dressing change" details no necessity for specific materials, leaves room for doubt as to compliance with doctor-ordered treatments, and can provide space for accusations from expert witnesses. Writing "Patient acting crazy," without quantifying statements and description of your actions, can be grounds for charges of negligence. Either one of these cases, in an extreme scenario, could be grounds for you to lose your license.

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Writing as a Professional Nurse // Purdue Writing Lab

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This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.

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Note: This article describes the 9th edition of MLA style and the 7th edition of APA Style. The APA 6th edition rules can be found here.

APA and MLA are two of the most commonly used citation styles.

APA Style Is defined in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, currently in its 7th edition.

The rules of MLA style are found in the MLA Handbook, currently in its 9th edition (published by the Modern Language Association).

In both styles, a source citation consists of:

However, citations look slightly different in each style, with different rules for things like title capitalization, author names, and placement of the date.

There are also some differences in layout and formatting. Download the Word templates for a correctly formatted paper in either style.

APA template MLA template

Which style should I use?

You'll usually be told which citation style you should use in your writing by your department or supervisor. If you're not sure, look up your institution's guidelines or ask directly.

Occasionally, you may be allowed to choose a style yourself. If so, it's best to base your decision on your area of study:

APA is used primarily in the (social and behavioral) sciences and in fields related to education.

MLA is primarily used in humanities subjects such as languages, literary studies, and media studies.

In-text citations in APA and MLA

Both MLA and APA use parenthetical citations to cite sources in the text. However, they include slightly different information.

An APA in-text citation includes the author's last name and the publication year. If you're quoting or paraphrasing a specific passage, you also add a page number.

An MLA in-text citation includes the author's last name and a page number-no year.

When there are two authors, APA Style separates their names with an ampersand (&), while MLA uses "and." For three or more authors, both styles list the first author followed by " et al. "

APA

MLA

1 author

(Taylor, 2018, p. 23)

(Taylor 23)

2 authors

(Taylor & Kotler, 2018, p. 23)

(Taylor and Kotler 23)

3+ authors

(Taylor et al., 2018, p. 23)

(Taylor et al. 23)

APA reference list vs. MLA Works Cited list

In both APA and MLA style, you list full details of all cited sources on a separate page at the end of your paper. In APA this is usually called the reference list; in MLA it's called the Works Cited.

The formatting of source entries is different in each style. Some key differences are summarized in the table below.

APA

MLA

Author name

Last name, Initial.

Mounier-Kuhn, P.

Last name, First name.

Mounier-Kuhn, Pierre.

Capitalization of source title

Sentence case (but capitalize after a colon): Sapiens: A brief history of humankind

Title case: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Formatting of titles

No formatting for chapters, articles, etc.; italics for books, journals, etc.:

Computer science in French universities: Early entrants and latecomers. Information & Culture: A Journal of History

Quotation marks for chapters, articles, etc.; italics for books, journals, etc.:

"Computer Science in French Universities: Early Entrants and Latecomers." Information & Culture: A Journal of History

Publication date

In parentheses after the author's name:

Mounier-Kuhn, P. (2012). ...

Later in the reference, not in parentheses:

... vol. 47, no. 4, 2012, ...

URLs & DOIs

No period after the URL or DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7560/IC47402

Period after the URL or DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7560/IC47402.

Using the interactive tool, you can switch between APA and MLA style citations for common source types to explore the differences for yourself.

You can automatically create your in-text citations and references in either style using the free Scribbr Citation Generator.

Generate accurate citations with Scribbr

APA vs. MLA paper formatting

The general formatting guidelines for APA and MLA are similar. Both styles recommend:

12 pt Times New Roman font

Double spacing

1 inch (2.54 cm) margins

The main differences between APA format and MLA format involve the title page, running head, and block quoting guidelines.

Title page and header

In APA, a separate cover page is required. It lists the title of your paper, your full name, your institution and department, the course the paper is for, your instructor's name, and the due date, all centered and double-spaced.

In MLA, no title page is required (though your instructor may require you to include one). Instead of a title page, you add a four-line header on the first page.

The header is left-aligned and double-spaced and lists your full name, your instructor's name, the course title or number, and the submission date. The paper's title is centered on a new line under the header.

Running head

In APA Style, include a right-aligned page number at the top of each page.

In manuscripts that will be submitted for publication, you should also include an APA running head with a shortened version of your paper's title (up to 50 characters long), all in capitals and left-aligned.

The running head is not required in student papers (unless you're instructed otherwise).

In MLA, your last name and the page number appear as a running head at the top of every page, both right-aligned.

Block quote formatting

Block quotes are long quotations that are set on a new line and indented as a block, without quotation marks.

In APA, any quote of 40 words or longer should be formatted as a block quote. In MLA, block quote formatting is used for quotes of more than four lines of prose or more than three lines of verse.

In both styles, the in-text citation is added after the period at the end of a block quote.

Frequently asked questions about citation styles

Which citation style should I use?

Check if your university or course guidelines specify which citation style to use. If the choice is left up to you, consider which style is most commonly used in your field.

Other more specialized styles exist for certain fields, such as Bluebook and OSCOLA for law.

The most important thing is to choose one style and use it consistently throughout your text.

Who uses APA Style?

APA format is widely used by professionals, researchers, and students in the social and behavioral sciences, including fields like education, psychology, and business.

Be sure to check the guidelines of your university or the journal you want to be published in to double-check which style you should be using.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the "Cite this Scribbr article" button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2022, August 23). APA vs MLA | The Key Differences in Format & Citation. Scribbr. Retrieved November 29, 2023, from https://www.scribbr.com/citing-sources/apa-vs-mla/

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APA vs. MLA | The Key Differences in Format & Citation

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Note: This article describes the 9th edition of MLA style and the 7th edition of APA Style. The APA 6th edition rules can be found here. APA and MLA are