A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WRITING

For prehealth students, the fall semester is writing season. The last few stragglers are submitting their personal statements to AMCAS. Colleges of dentistry, optometry, and podiatry are accepting applications. New junior packets for the entering class of 2003 will be available on November 15th. Applications for nursing, cytotechnology, clinical laboratory science, occupational therapy, physical therapy, respiratory care, and social work will soon be available--all of these applications require writing. On top of that you have papers to do for your classes. For a good number of students this is a good time to discuss some of the keys to good writing--in prehealth terms, of course.

If we could give you just one piece of advice about writing that would benefit you greatly when the time came for you to write your application essays, we would give you just one word: practice. View your writing courses as a window of opportunity, and make the most of them. Give each paper you write the time it deserves--don't just "crank it out" the night before the deadline. Read good books, and pay close attention to how great authors say things, not just to what they say. Correspond with your friends through e-mail and discuss substantive issues with them. Read the newspaper and take a stand on what you read. All of these things are good practice and will serve you well whether you are speaking or writing. If you do these things, not only will you get more out of your education, you will bring a strong and healthy set of communication skills to schools of the health professions when you apply to them.

On one level, the world of communication, both spoken and written, bears a similarity to the world of health. Both are intensely private things by their very nature. Your "health" is a kind of summation of what is going on in your own body, and if this is not a matter on which you have substantial rights of privacy and control, what is? Your powers of communication are also private and internal. How creative you are, how fast you think, how well you listen and remember, as well as what you listen and remember for all play a part in how good a communicator you can be.

Communication and health are both public affairs, though. The health of one individual can impact upon another, especially when we are thinking of infectious diseases or expensive illnesses in an age of rationed resources. Good, bad, or indifferent ideas and values also travel from person to person. As far as health goes you will learn all that you want to, and perhaps a bit more, once you get into the health professional school of your choice. Of course, you want to learn something about the field of health care now, but the day when you begin to become an expert belongs to the future.

Good communication, on the other hand is an area where you need to begin building expertise as an undergraduate, mainly because these four years could be your biggest window of opportunity to focus on this task. In the long term, your communication skills could affect how well you work with patients and colleagues. In the short term, your ability to communicate, with both the written and the spoken word can have some influence on your strength as an applicant to schools of the health professions.

There's more at stake here than groping for what to jot down on a birthday card, so with the benefits of good communication skills in mind, as well as with a fairly realistic sense of the cost of acquiring them, let's talk about how to work on your writing, and then we will move on to discuss a few points of a literary form that often gives prehealth students grief, the personal essay.

Before that, we need to get a few basic ideas out of the way and into the open about communication and writing. There are no "magic words and phrases" which work every time. When it comes to expressing your ideas, you want to think in terms of developing a way of thinking about and discussing problems that is unique to you, but which is also clear and reasonable to your readers. What this means is that any time you sit down at your computer to write something you are trying to hit two targets at the same time: uniqueness and clarity. In any given assignment, one of these targets might be more important than the other.

For example, if you are attempting to write an accurate analysis of the long term effects of Soviet-era irrigation policy on the water levels in the Caspian Sea, the question, "But does this really express who I am?" will not come anywhere near the importance of a clear grasp of the facts and your understanding of their implications. In creative writing and personal communication, "uniqueness to you" will be a crucial factor. In general, close adherence to the facts will make you credible, and some degree of originality will keep your readers awake.

The second concern, "keeping your readers awake," is what makes the process of writing, especially in the world of personal statements, a challenge. Good turns of phrase are like light bulbs: with time and use they burn out and illuminate nothing. Often, the burnt out phrases are the ones that pop into your mind first, mainly because you have heard them so much. Sometimes, the meaning of those expressions has changed with heavy use. You can see examples of this in history. The author, Robert Graves, talked about the use of the phrase, "Volunteers step forward!" during the First World War. At the start of the war, people saw that expression as a sincere request for dedicated people to do a job, and it got responses. As the war dragged on and more of those sincere and dedicated people went home in wooden boxes, the phrase became a bad joke, a code word for "Who wants to die today?" Nowadays, the word "volunteering" has ceased to emit those negative vibrations.

So, when you encounter expressions that are used in industrial quantities, turns of phrase like, "I really love to help people," or "I love to work in a team," which somehow still capture exactly how you feel in your heart, there are three options open to you: use the phrase with the understanding that it doesn't pack much power anymore; wait for eighty or so years until it becomes fresh and new again; take the time to figure out how you can say what you want to say in your own words.

Luckily for you, the time for figuring out how to say what you want in your own words can coincide with your undergraduate academic career. Your liberal arts courses can be particularly helpful. The key rules for success are to listen, read, think, and link. Listening during lectures, reading the course material, and thinking about the material are things that you are already doing--how else can you get an A? The fourth step, linking, is something that you might not have started to do yet, so we will give you a few "dime store" examples to help you on your way. (What you will want to do is apply these templates to your own course work, to the material that you are getting from the experts, your professors.) Let us say, while you are perusing your materials for an English literature course, you come across a sentence from T. S. Eliot that runs like this, "Between the conception and the creation, between the stimulus and the response falls the shadow." Does this sentence conjure up any thoughts that relate to health care--perhaps something relating to the sense of frustration that a person who has suffered some sort of traumatic injury feels when they are in the early stages of rehabilitation, and know quite well what they would like to do, yet are unable to accomplish even simple tasks with the ease that they once did? Does the idea of helping someone through a particular kind of "shadow" or hindrance better express the kind of helping that you wish to achieve in your career?

Or perhaps in looking over some material about ethics you come across the fact that the word "ethics" can be linked back at some remove to a Greek word "ethos," a custom or way of doing things. Does this simple concept give you a better grasp of how you want to apply ethics in your own work in health care, or a sense that you cannot divorce ethics from action, and that for you to be an "ethical player" in the game of health care, you must make sure that a certain standard of personal and professional behavior imbues all of your interactions with patients? It could be the case that your studies in economics or sociology give you a better idea of what the word "system" in health care system means, or more of an understanding of the interplay between ideals, such as compassion and equality, and available material resources.

In short, by making your education your own--all of it, not just science prerequisites--by the time you apply to schools of the health professions, you will be well on the way to being a life-long learner in reality not just words. The time that you put into your studies will set you apart from students who take the "trade school" approach to their undergraduate years, and give you an edge both as a writer and as an interviewee.

At some point you will need to put your insights and experiences to use, put them down on paper to explain just why it is you want to enter the health career you have selected. You might decide to keep a small journal of your jottings and ideas as they come to you so that you already have material to work with when you have to sit down and write a personal statement. Once you are actually at the point of writing a personal statement, there are a few mechanical points that you might want to keep in mind. They could make your writing more effective.

Let's begin at the beginning. In the first sentence of your statement, you determine how ideas will flow on two fronts: the "factual front," and the "rhetorical front." There are no prizes for guessing what the "factual front" is: it is what you are talking about. The "rhetorical front" is a little subtler. This is where you establish a rhythm for what you are talking about, determine how the sequence of what you say will line up with the sequence of what happens in reality, where you might give clues as to what you think and feel about what you are discussing. It can be that the first sentence of your statement carries more of a rhetorical than a factual burden.

To give an example, let's think of two possible beginnings for a piece about a topic that is much better known to the general public than your thoughts, feelings, and motivations: global warming and greenhouse gases. On the one hand, you might start out by saying, "Due to rapid industrialization during the twentieth century "greenhouse gases" and aerosols are present in the earth's atmosphere in ever increasing quantities." On the other hand, you might begin by saying, "Mark Twain once observed that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. The twentieth century has proved him wrong." Each one of these beginnings of a little essay about global warming and the "greenhouse effect" is equally valid. Each one will eventually lead to a discussion of the same problem. These two beginnings are different in tone and focus. As you think about it, you will discover that there are a number of different ways that you can begin and carry through a discussion where you are the main topic.

We are not going to give you a step by step list of things that you should do for writing the rest of your personal essay. There is no one infallible procedure to follow when you write a personal statement. Each high quality personal statement is good in its own way. As two distinct groups, the good ones and the bad ones are worlds apart, though. There are, however, a few basic techniques that you can use in evaluating and editing your work--these are more guidelines that can show you where you need to improve, rather than "cookbook directions." Let's take a look at two of them "cutting," and "filtering."

The cutting technique consists in this: take a look at each sentence in your personal statement and ask yourself how many people could say the same thing you did. If you look at your personal statement with this in mind and begin to notice that most of the things you are writing are true for just about anybody, you might want to rethink what you are saying. ("I like science. I love to help people, and I believe I can help people in this profession. This profession has always interested me.") To get your "creative juices flowing" look at that bland and general sentence and ask yourself questions about it. What is it that you like about science? What aspect of science? If you like the application of science, what is it that you like about the application of science? As a health care practitioner, you are going to inhabit a world of specifics, and admissions committees want to see that you are well acquainted with and engaged by what you do. Of course, there are going to be some elements in your personal essay that are common to most statements, but since you are an individual who has been living your own life and who has specific motivations for entering the health field there should be something about your personal statement that is fairly unique to you.

The "filtering" technique encompasses a range of things that you do when you clean up a paper for submission. You need to check carefully for spelling errors; a good word processing program provides valuable assistance, but it won't catch all errors like "form" instead of "from." You should also filter for forms--such as passive constructions in over-abundance. You can check your statement for style, and this is where your experience as a reader comes in. Ask yourself if what you have written is too simplistic, if the tone is too cold and distant, if the humor you have included is a little out place. It is very important to make sure that your "chain of causation" is intact: the logical connections should be clear when you state that one event caused another.

To get a better idea of how to evaluate your work, you might decide to check out the book, The Reader over your Shoulder; a Handbook for Writers of English Prose, by Robert Graves (call number: PR751 .G7 1966). In the final part of the book, Graves looks at pieces of writing by other authors, and "tears them apart" for logical, grammatical, and stylistic flaws. After you read this, you should have a better idea of what to do.

Human behavior is complex, and so is the road to a career in the health professions. To succeed, you have to be in touch with your motivations, know where you are strong, where you are weak, how to tackle problems, and how to improve yourself. Admissions committees are often interested in knowing these things about their applicants, and to a fair degree they rely upon you to tell them. With preparation, planning, persistence, and practice you should be able to do an excellent job.