Increasing Professional Writing Skills with Self Publishing

Clinical scholarship is an expected outcome of doctorally prepared nurse practitioners and is considered essential to the advancement of the profession as a practice based discipline.  Nurse practitioners are not well equipped to lead initiatives to improve health outcomes if they can’t write well enough or don’t have the confidence to share practice based experiences.  Opportunities to write and revise as requirements of professional scholarship are limited in most practice-based curriculums for BSN-DNP students.  Some programs offer “how-to” or scientific writing courses but they don’t always provide the emotional support needed by novice writers.  While, traditional venues for publication are encouraged, the outcome of getting published is not guaranteed and confidence can be shattered at an early stage.  Confidence or the belief that you can do something is an important component of self-efficacy and motivation.

 This innovative extracurricular publishing project for BSN-DNP students was built on using clinical case studies that focused on development of diagnostic reasoning skills and using evidence to make clinical decisions for optimal patient management.  The carrot of actually knowing that their contribution would definitely be published and available in an ebook format on Kindle (R) helped motivate the nine students who volunteered to participate.  With the support of the faculty member as editor, students worked to revise their cases to be included in a self-published eBook.  Issues related to copyright, profit and self-publishing resources and platforms will be discussed.