Healthcare Writing
These OWL resources will help you write in medical, healthcare, and/or scientific contexts. This section includes original research articles and samples of the healthcare writing produced for a more general, lay-population audience.
Medical Journalism
This resource contains information on medical journalism. The material explains the objectives of medical journalism and its applications in the media. Moreover, this resource demonstrates ways writers can accurately translate complex, scientific literature into layperson's terms.
SOAP Notes
This resource provides information on SOAP Notes, which are a clinical documentation format used in a range of healthcare fields. The resource discusses the audience and purpose of SOAP notes, suggested content for each section, and examples of appropriate and inappropriate language.
Patient Education Materials
This resource contains strategies and examples for crafting patient education documents. It explains medical data collection and audience awareness concerning readers in hospitals and clinics. Additionally, the source pays special attention to pamphlet organization and patient terminology.
Writing as a Veterinary Technician
The intention of this section is to provide veterinary technicians with guidelines for writing the patient care plan portion of the veterinary medical record. As there is no standardized format for writing a veterinary care plan, the following principles are only one example of how a care plan may be formulated.
Writing as a Professional Nurse
These resources will help you write on the job and in the classes you will take to become a nurse.
"Writing as a Professional Nurse" provides three general, though important, rules working nurses should keep in mind while writing reports and charts and while communicating with doctors and patients.
"Writing in the Field" discusses three examples of writing tasks nurses perform: flowcharts, careplans, and narratives.
"List of Nursing Resources" provides links to Purdue OWL resources that both nurses and nursing students might find helpful while writing for work or school. Each link provides a brief description of the resource and how and why it will help nurses and students with their writing tasks.
