3 ESSAY

3 essay

3 essay

Essay 1

 Academic writing has long been recognised as an essential skill university students need to. Research on writing in the British university context indicates that on admission students are already supposed to know at least the basics of academic writing argue that university students are sometimes expected to write with a high degree of precision even before starting their programmes. These views echo the opinion that content lecturers in specific disciplines hold. In one of the few published articles about writing in nursing, Hyland (2002b) argues that there are two fairly common beliefs: students will develop academic writing relatively easily, and they will do it to the expected standards.

These assumptions, Whitehead contends, do not always materialise as most nursing students find writing difficult and standards confusing. In her study on the literacy experiences of a nursing student, Hyland( 2001)also refers to the importance that content lecturers attach to academic writing: Although the College of Nursing did not officially require any specific amount of writing in any of its courses, faculty considered writing an important skill for their graduates to master.  Although content and writing lecturers' opinions about the importance of academic writing converge, they seem to differ in how they perceive students' needs. Whereas writing lecturers appear to focus on the basic principles of writing (e.g., paragraphing, structuring, referencing), content lecturers seem to take these as given and use 'academic writing' or 'writing skills' as a short-cut for discipline-specific thinking, argumentation, and content.

The interpretation and application of guidelines and marking criteria seem to be another area of disagreement. Research in this area has shown that guidelines and assessment criteria are not always made sufficiently specific to students and may not constitute the 'homogenous set of requirements' they are sometimes believed to be. How writing and content lecturers apply these criteria appears to reflect what they teach (writing or content) and how they perceive writing principles (general or discipline-specific). 

Studies on how these beliefs, assumptions and disagreements materialise in health care university programmes in general, and in nursing and midwifery pre-registration1 programmes in particular are rather scant (cf. Leki, 2003; Whitehead, 2002). In fact, applied linguistics has paid little attention to written genres in the health care sector (Candlin & Candlin, 2003) despite its long-standing interest in genre and genre pedagogy. To date, the limited published work has focused on either doctor-patient relationships (Hyland 2002a)) or post-registration activity, possibly reflecting a new direction towards the investigation of workplace genres in applied linguistics and discourse studies .

In nursing research has focused on the writing needs of professionals, producing a significant number of publications on workplace writing, with a special emphasis on supporting nurses to publish. Similarly, the literature on writing in midwifery has tended to concentrate almost exclusively on post-registration demands. The specific academic writing experiences of undergraduate nursing and midwifery students, however, have remained under-researched. The academic essay has been named the 'default genre' in higher education. It has also been identified as one of the most demanding tasks students have to face and a main source of their frustration .

Essay 2

Confidentiality is an important concern to counselors and thought to be essential to ...