How to Write an Excellent Nursing Essay: a Guide

So, you’ve received an assignment to write a nursing essay. Many nursing students experience a bit of anxiety when faced with this task because of many reasons, including a lack of scholarly writing style or research skills. Well, a scholarly paper for a nursing course is indeed a unique type of work that addresses complex topics relevant to the medical field as well as the nursing profession and typically involves a lot of research.

If you need to know where to begin and how to complete this assignment, feel free to check out the steps below. To show you the process of writing a good paper that can get you an A, we’ll use an example of an essay on diabetes prevention, which is a common healthcare topic.

How to Write a Nursing Essay

Step #1: Research

Anyone with experience in academic writing will tell you that writing scholarly papers begins with the research. Writing nursing papers is not an exception. To write an essay on such a complex topic as diabetes prevention, you need to find quality information.
For example, you can look for:

• Recent diabetes prevalence statistics
• Diabetes risk factors
• Diabetes prevention strategies

To locate this information, you need only reliable, scholarly resources such as:

• U.S. National Library of Medicine. A vast source of research papers, studies, and articles on a wide range of medicine and healthcare-related topics
• National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. A reliable source of information on diabetes care, prevention, and treatment
• Prevention: American Diabetes Association. A section containing information on prevention of diabetes from ADA.

Step #2: Outline the Structure

No, don’t write just yet. Even though you have a lot of information on the topic now, you need to structure your writing before you begin doing it. A typical essay structure says that you have to have three major parts: introduction, body, and conclusion.
How do we structure an essay on our topic, then?

Here’s one way:

I. Introduction. Begin this section with some statistics on diabetes and how many lives could be saved if prevention programs are implemented properly. Then, proceed to the definition of the condition and finish the section with a strong thesis statement. For example, you could claim that more prevention programs are needed to be implemented in communities to reduce the disease toll.

II. Body. Here, we need to support our statement by showing the need for more diabetes prevention programs. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that 84 million Americans have prediabetes (so they are highly likely to develop the disease within five years); of those, 90 percent don’t know they have it! So, since prediabetes is largely preventable through increased screening and testing, this makes a good case for the need for more community-based prevention programs.

One more thing: don’t forget to structure your body: one claim for one paragraph, but stay within the word limits requested by your professor.

III. Conclusion. Here, we concisely summarize the content of the essay and rewrite the thesis statement to reinforce your personal opinion on the topic. 

Step #3: Write the Essay

Now you finally can begin writing. Make sure that the flow of ideas is logical and you use scholarly language. Also, use transition words such as “However” and “Moreover” to help the reader understand the relationship between sentences and parts of the text.

Remember: even though an essay heavily relies on the writer’s point of view, you still need to be objective; for that, you need scholarly sources that we discussed above.

Step #4: Cite Your Sources

This is something that many nursing students need to get academic help with. Keep in mind that it’s your duty to give credit to academic sources, so don’t forget to cite them by using the American Psychological Association (APA) style, which is the most common citation style among nurses. Visit their official website to get information on how to use this style in your essay.

Step #5: Proofread

Often skipped by many, proofreading is an essential requirement for an excellent essay. Be sure to check your text for spelling, grammar, and other common mistakes to avoid making a bad impression.

Your Nursing Essay is Ready

The main goal for written works within nursing nurses is to clearly describe complex topics to demonstrate a deep understanding of them. Thus, the quality of writing is often dependent upon your ability to research and evaluate scholar information, describe it concisely, and provide meaningful takeaways.

Hopefully the writing process described above gave you the tips you need to write an excellent nursing essay and improve your research skills at the same time. Keep in mind that every written task you get in nursing school is important because you need to know how to effectively communicate in writing. You’ve got a lot of care plans, patient charts, research papers, literature reviews, and maybe even journal articles to write in the future, so start preparing now.