Doctoral Writing in the Age of Twitter©: How To Create a Scholarly Writing Environment

Students begin doctoral education demonstrating variable expertise in their writing skills. Writing skills acquired during baccalaureate or master’s education may have been weakened or lost due to current electronic writing practices. Therefore, beginning doctor of nursing practice (DNP) students may lack scholarly writing abilities. As students begin the DNP program, faculty frequently observe significant writing deficiencies. The ability to write effectively is a critical element of doctoral study. Unfortunately, a gap often exists between scholarly writing expectations and students’ scholarly writing performance.  

Based on a recognized need to improve doctoral level writing skills, the DNP faculty developed an innovative and comprehensive writing studio to enhance first semester students’ writing abilities. The writing studio emphasizes and honors the scholarship of writing. The writing studio highlights purposeful writing using scaffolding as the framework that weaves a sequence of content, materials, and tasks to support scholarly writing.

 The writing studio includes both didactic sessions and faculty-mentored small group activities, emphasizing identification of rhetorical writing moves and appropriate sentence structure. Following the writing studio session, students complete an assignment designed to demonstrate mastery of both the rhetorical moves and writing skills. Students are provided comprehensive feedback from faculty in this initial writing assignment regarding how well their writing encompassed the rhetorical moves expected in scholarly writing.

To advance the scholarship of writing environment, a web site was developed for use by DNP students and faculty, including resources for scholarly writing and links to writing information and web sites. Following introduction to the rhetorical moves in writing and sentence structure, the second semester writing studio session emphasizes how to write an analysis and synthesis of evidence. Over the two semesters, DNP students are asked to provide both formative and summative evaluations regarding the writing studio and perceived growth in their scholarly writing abilities.