Your Professor's Advice

Advice from Your Professors

When faculty in the nursing program (Professors Sorrell, Redmond, Durham, Blasser, Chong, Fisher, and Goode) were surveyed about their opinions on student writing, comments ranged from "Quite good" to "Students don't write at as sophisticated a level as they could." "Very few papers are in the middle," one professor said. "Either very strong and polished or very weak."

So what steps can you take to make your work stand among the "strong and polished"? Your professors have a variety of suggestions for you:

• work at writing, spending time to improve
• acknowledge that writing is a process with a series of steps
• be willing to ask for feedback in the process of writing, not just when you're finished
• find a "trusted reader" to read drafts of your work
• be willing to accept constructive criticism to improve your writing
• ask questions of the professor if you don't understand your assignment
• create a schedule when you have a writing assignment so that you don't do all the writing at the last minute
• realize that good writers write and rewrite until they have a strong paper--you can't just sit down and write a paper in one sitting.

But what is your professor looking for in a paper?

• First and foremost, professors expect that you followed the guidelines for the assignment.
• They expect a main idea developed throughout the paper, a clear and succinct thesis supported by each paragraph, with no extraneous material.
• They want to read logical papers that flow well and are easy to read.
• They look for correct spelling, punctuation, grammar, and use of the APA format.

Faculty caution that students must be careful about avoiding plagiarism and using citations correctly. One of the consequences of plagiarism is that you may fail a course. This link will help you consider if you are citing sources appropriately-many writing handbooks can do the same.