Assignment:Embarking on an Advanced Degree

Assignment:Embarking on an Advanced Degree

ORDER NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT: Assignment:Embarking on an Advanced Degree

Assignment:Embarking on an Advanced Degree

As a nurse embarking on an advanced degree, you are developing the characteristics of a scholar-practitioner, which includes strong communication skills. Writing in a scholarly manner involves supporting your thoughts with evidence from the literature and appropriately using APA formatting.

One of the challenges of scholarly writing is paraphrasing the thoughts of others in your work. Paraphrasing, and correctly citing the original author for his or her ideas, allows you to take the ideas of others, summarize them, and incorporate them into your own writing. When summarizing the ideas of others, it is important to avoid plagiarizing (copying the words and ideas of others as though they were your own). In addition to expanding your knowledge of APA, this week’s Learning Resources help you to distinguish between paraphrasing and plagiarizing.

To prepare:

Think about the sometimes subtle difference between plagiarizing and paraphrasing.
Read the following paragraphs, which were written by Patricia O’Conner:
A good writer is one you can read without breaking a sweat. If you want a workout, you don’t lift a book—you lift weights. Yet we’re brainwashed to believe that the more brilliant the writer, the tougher the going.

The truth is that the reader is always right. Chances are, if something you’re reading doesn’t make sense, it’s not your fault—it’s the writer’s. And if something you write doesn’t get your point across, it’s probably not the reader’s fault—it’s yours. Too many readers are intimidated and humbled by what they can’t understand, and in some cases that’s precisely the effect the writer is after. But confusion is not complexity; it’s just confusion. A venerable tradition, dating back to the ancient Greek orators, teaches that if you don’t know what you’re talking about, just ratchet up the level of difficulty and no one will ever know.

Don’t confuse simplicity, though, with simplemindedness. A good writer can express an extremely complicated idea clearly and make the job look effortless. But such simplicity is a difficult thing to achieve because to be clear in your writing you have to be clear in your thinking. This is why the simplest and clearest writing has the greatest power to delight, surprise, inform, and move the reader. You can’t have this kind of shared understanding if writer and reader are in an adversary relationship. (pp. 195–196)
Source: O’Conner, P. (2003). Woe is I: The grammarphobe’s guide to better English in plain English. New York: Riverhead Books.
Paraphrase this passage from O’Conner using no more than 75–100 words. Remember that paraphrasing means summarizing the essence of the original text. It does not mean creating a thesaurus-based revision of the author’s original words or copying the piece, or any part of it, word for word. For this activity, do not use any direct quotes.
Turn your paraphrase into Grammarly and SafeAssign.
Review your reports.
Review the other tools, resources, and services available to you through the Walden Writing Center that support your growth as a scholarly writer.
Consider which of these resources you find to be most useful.
Review learning resources on APA formatting rules and information within the Walden Writing Center on APA

Post a description of your experience of using Grammarly and SafeAssign and share at least one insight you gained about paraphrasing and avoiding plagiarism as a matter of academic integrity. Recommend at least one other online resource that supports scholarly writing, and explain your rationale. Lastly, share two APA formatting rules with the class and a specific page number in the APA manual where this rule can be located

Support your Discussion assignment with specific resources used in its preparation using APA formatting. You are asked to provide a reference for all resources, including those in the Learning Resources for this course.

attachment
week3reading2.pdf
attachment
week3reading.pdf

Discussion:Embarking on an Advanced Degree

Discussion:Embarking on an Advanced Degree

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.