Professional writing in nursing education: creating an academic-community writing center

Contemporary professional nursing requires competency in both oral and written communication. Outside of writing for publication, instructional methods to teach professional writing in baccalaureate nursing programs are not well documented in the literature. The need for professional writing, coupled with the need to diversify the workforce with students from varying ethnic and educational backgrounds, creates some additional challenges to meet programmatic requirements for scholarly, evidence-based writing outcomes. As two new prelicensure programs were initiated, a comprehensive assessment was conducted that included student focus groups and writing assessment tools to assess writing quality and student support needs. As a result of these data, faculty implemented curricular and instructional revisions and created a writing center that was staffed by older adult volunteers who had careers in writing. The processes, tools, and preliminary outcomes of these faculty-initiated changes to improve student support for writing are presented.