Academic Writing Specialist Shares Her Expertise With Graduate Students
Nursing students often exit Whitney Kurtz-Ogilvie’s office ready to go and with a sense of relief. Nothing could please this faculty member more.
Kurtz-Ogilvie, MFAW, is an academic writing specialist for the College of Nursing and UK HealthCare. She was hired five years ago, in a joint appointment, to help DNPs and PhDs and those pursuing advanced nursing degrees with scholarly writing.
A good portion of her work is sitting down one-on-one with her students and helping them tackle the writing of academic papers, craft personal mission statements for graduate school applications or put together presentations. Though they sometimes come to her on their own, many students are referred by faculty or supervisors, or are identified by diagnostic screening.
“People come into my office, and they are struggling,” Kurtz-Ogilvie says. “Writing can be terrifying to a lot of people and make them lose confidence. My favorite thing is to give them the tools to fix that. They leave energized.
“That transformation is my holy grail.”
Executive Associate Dean and Marion E. McKenna Professor Patricia Howard, PhD, RN, FAAN, says the challenge of developing students’ writing skills is not unique to nursing schools but is one that is faced by many graduate-level programs nationwide.
What makes good writing skills imperative to PhDs and DNPs is that they are expected to expand the scientific basis for patient care, she says. “It’s important that they be able to write scholarly information about research and improving practice.”
Their leadership roles also require a skill set that includes strength in critical thinking demonstrated in clear, organized writing, with good punctuation and grammar, she says.
“We need to be stronger in these things,” Dr. Howard says. “I wish we could double Whitney, especially as our enrollment has grown.”
Kurtz-Ogilvie’s career has been devoted to writing. She received her bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Maryland before earning a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She taught at a small private art college in Chicago for several years before coming to UK, where she started as an adjunct faculty member of the UK Writing Department, teaching freshman English.
She found out about her current position during a chance encounter with one of her program directors on an elevator ride. The director had been consulting for the College of Nursing—assessing its students’ writing—and had recommended they hire a full-time faculty member to support its graduate students.
“When she saw me on the elevator, she pointed at me and says, ‘You! You’d be good for this; you should apply.’ So I did. It was a hair’s breadth of chance that I even found out about the position, but I’m glad I did,” Kurtz-Ogilvie says.
When she was offered the job, she took it knowing it would be an interesting challenge. “But I wasn’t sure if I would really find a niche here among scientists after working in the humanities for so long,” she says. “… But the faculty and students welcomed me warmly right away, and the people here are so committed, and the work they are doing is so important. I loved it here immediately.”
UK College of Nursing Dean Janie Heath says they “are fortunate to have Whitney’s expertise and passion as a dedicated resource to support graduate students.”
“In today’s academic health sciences environment it is critical to not only support scholarly writing for DNP capstones and PhD dissertations but all of graduate coursework papers that are publishable,” says Dr. Heath.
One of the most common strengths nurses and nursing students share is their passion and knowledge in their particular fields of study, Kurtz-Ogilvie says. “They have so much fire in the belly. These nurses want to be leaders in their field, and it’s inspiring to watch. Most of them are also highly motivated learners, very eager for constructive feedback. That’s a joy for me as a teacher.”
One of the most common challenges, she says, is that students tend to default to description and summary in their writing.
“[They don’t] flex their analytical and critical thinking muscles as much as they could,” she says. “I think that’s a result of the way writing is taught in most public schools. We’re taught to memorize facts, summarize and define and describe, but we’re not really taught to invent, to ask tough questions, to challenge our own thinking and make new meaning.
“So when students get to the doctoral level and they are expected to really dive in and analyze and synthesize ideas, they can struggle a bit at first. I try to help them with that.”
Sometimes, it starts with the basics.
“Just as they would have to start with the basics if they were teaching me nursing,” she says. “My students have a lot to say, and they have so much expertise in their areas of interest. It’s just that many of them haven’t been taught the tricks of the writing trade.”
The discussions often focus on the writing process — brainstorming, outlining, and revision. For further support, Kurtz-Ogilvie has a developed a website to share PowerPoint presentations and other resources on writing, such as her “writing tip of the week.” She also teaches an elective class each summer on scholarly writing.
“I want to help demystify writing for them, show them that it’s just a skill like any other. And there are practical tools to help them master it,” she says.
And, practicality is a big plus with nurses and nursing students.
“If you can show evidence that what you are telling them works, they appreciate it,” she says. “So a big part of my job is to give them practical advice — tips and techniques — to help them translate their ideas into something that’s clear and logically organized and accessible.”
For Dr. Howard, building students’ writing skills is part of something bigger: “This is one more means that will help the students be successful, and that is goal.”
