How to write
What Is Nursing Essay? Everything You Need to Know
Author:
Samantha Williams
Dec 27, 2024
8 min
Table of contents
From Topic to Conclusion: Writing Nursing Essays Made Simple
If you’re starting your academic journey, you will most definitely have to master the fundamentals of writing good essays.
It might not be the most common assignment type for nursing students—as it’s mostly for humanities and social sciences classes—but you will still face essays at some point.
So, how to write a nursing essay? Define your topic, conduct thorough research, structure your paper with an introduction, body, and conclusion, and support your arguments with evidence-based sources. Also, never neglect to outline first; it makes writing way easier.
This was just a quick peak, though. Now, let’s explore nursing essay writing in more detail.
How to Write a Nursing Essay: A Step-by-Step Plan
It’s always easier to describe the writing process when there’s a specific topic to use as an example. So let’s say you’ve just been admitted to a nursing school and need to write a What Does Nursing Mean to You essay. What would that look like?
- Brainstorm ideas and narrow down your topic.
3. Outline.
4. Find relevant literature to back up your arguments (if required). Given the topic, this might not be necessary, but it’s always a good idea to double-check with your instructor.
5. Write a draft introduction with a strong thesis statement.
6. Develop body paragraphs with clear and effective topic sentences.
7. Write a conclusion, and then revise both the introduction and the conclusion to make sure they frame the essay well and convey your key idea (which is expressed in the thesis statement).
8. Revise, edit, proofread. Yes, those are three separate tasks, so you’re actually editing thrice.
How to write an essay for nursing school? Admission essays
Although all essays call for similar pre-writing and writing steps, there’s a special genre where the focus is somewhat different—admission essays. You might need to understand what those are supposed to look like if you have yet to get into the nursing program you plan to complete.
Unlike other essays, admission nursing essays are focused on you. To answer the question “How to write an essay for nursing school?”, you need to reflect on what you’ve already achieved, why you’re interested in nursing, why you’re applying for this particular program, and what you intend to do with the degree.
However, when it comes to the structure, admission essays aren’t all that special. You still need a good structure, a compelling thesis statement, and well-developed body paragraphs.
How to start a nursing essay? Does it need a hook?
Once you have a clear topic, it’s time to think about how you intend to start your essay to make sure you have your readers’ full attention from the get-go.
There’s a common misconception that only speeches or articles need a hook. In reality, it belongs in essays, too—even more so if you’re trying to stand out to the admissions committee.
So, yes, an essay does require a hook. It can be an interesting fact or quote relevant to the topic, a piece of statistics, or anything else that’s guaranteed to pique the reader’s curiosity and make them keep reading.
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What Is Nursing Essay? Essays vs. Other Paper Types
Nursing assignments vary. The most common types are a nursing research paper, a nursing application essay, a nursing pathophysiology paper, and a case study. There are more, though, including a care plan, a policy analysis paper, a proposal, and even a nursing dissertation paper (but you don’t need that one if you’re just starting your academic journey).
So, how are essays different from other paper types? The answer depends on the essay type; what works in a reflective essay isn’t always suitable for an argumentative or expository essay (and vice versa).
However, what unites most essays is that they are at least somewhat reflective in nature, and their structure tends to be freer compared to, say, a research paper.
A nursing assessment paper that involves tons of numerical data will almost always have sections like Methods and Results. A nursing philosophy paper—which is typically an essay detailing the student’s unique outlook on the nursing profession—doesn’t require those.
Why do would-be nurses have to write essays?
Seeing as nursing isn’t a humanities or a social sciences major, what is the role of a nurse essay? Once again, the answer depends on what kind of essay we are talking about.
If it’s an admission essay, the purpose is self-explanatory: aspiring nursing students need to convince the committee that they are a good fit for nursing in general and the specific program they’re applying for in particular.
Once you get in, the role of essays changes. They become the best exercises for students mastering their analysis, rhetoric, and argumentation skills.
Here, there’s no real difference between nursing and other majors—essays teach students to think and, most importantly, articulate their thoughts.
How Do You Write a Good Nursing Essay on a Free Topic?
This doesn’t happen all that often, but sometimes, first-year nursing students get to pick topics for their papers themselves. If you’re lucky, and this happens to you, follow these two rules when picking your essay topic.
First, make sure to choose something you’re actually interested in. The author’s interest (or disinterest) in what they’re writing about always comes through. You’re guaranteed to do better if you genuinely care about the subject of your essay.
Also, do preliminary research before you finalize the topic. If your essay requires a bibliography—which free-topic nursing assignments typically do—you need to double-check if there’s enough (but not too much!) relevant and credible scholarly literature out there for you to back up your arguments.
A few helpful tips and tricks for nursing essays
By this point, you already have a good idea of how to write essay for nursing school. Still, to help you further, here are a few less obvious nursing-specific best practices for essay writing:
- Whenever possible, use real-world nursing scenarios to illustrate your points. It always works better because the reader gets to see why your idea works.
8. Regardless of the topic, reference current trends and challenges in nursing to show your awareness and genuine interest in the profession.
9. If the topic allows this, try to connect your arguments to broader healthcare themes, such as patient advocacy or holistic care.
What Is Nursing Essay? A Quick Recap Before You Start Writing
We hope that you’re now well-equipped to write a decent What Does It Mean to Be a Nurse essay—or any other nursing essay. And we also hope that you feel more confident and aren’t struggling with the fear of a blank page.
A few final tips before you get to writing:
- Make sure your topic is sufficiently well-researched but also narrow enough; it must also be something that resonates with you.
4. Follow the traditional essay structure: an effective introduction with a hook and a thesis statement, well-developed body paragraphs with topic sentences, and a conclusion that ties everything together.
5. If it’s an admission essay, make sure to focus as much on why you’re a good fit for the program as you do on why you’re interested in joining it in the first place. Would-be students often neglect the former.
Good luck! You can do it.
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To write a nursing essay for school admissions, start by asking yourself three questions. 1. Why am I applying for this program? 2. Why am I a good fit for this program? (aka What do I bring to the table?) 3. What do I intend to do with this degree? Unless you have a specific prompt you must respond to, these are the things the admissions committee expects to see in your essay.
When it comes to self-reflective topics like this one, honesty paired with reason is the best strategy. You probably have an answer to this question already, so articulating it shouldn’t be all that hard.
However, if you suspect that your reasoning isn’t good enough (for example, if you’re only interested in becoming a nurse because everyone in your family is a nurse), there’s nothing wrong with tweaking the truth a bit.
Nursing essays are indeed somewhat different from research papers. Research papers typically require an experiment of sorts, and they document the details of that experiment through such sections as Methods, Materials, Results, Discussion, etc.
In contrast, essays, especially reflective nursing essays (like an articulation of your nursing philosophy), are simpler in structure and don’t have an experimental component to them. However, they require serious analytical and rhetorical skills, so they aren’t necessarily easier to write.
Whether or not a nursing essay requires a bibliography depends on the essay. Most of them do, even if their focus is self-reflection.
For example, Personal Nursing Philosophy essays still need a bibliography because you need to show where your philosophy stems from and why it makes sense. However, certain essay types - like admission essays, unless otherwise specified in the instructions - don’t require students to rely on outside sources and, therefore, add a bibliography.
