Seeing Near and Seeing Far: Writing for Nurses, Including the Powerful Op-Ed

In this session, journalist and author Sarah DiGregorio will lead a writing workshop designed to give nurses the tools to get their expert commentary to a broad, general audience. We will focus on the form of the op-ed, as nurses are subject matter experts who are uniquely positioned to propose solutions to problems that affect the public's health. Nurses have stories—stories that illuminate and reveal important truths about the health care system, about what it means to care for individuals and communities, and about the root causes of suffering. As Australian nurse-scholar Jill White has said, nurses see near—they know their patients, their students, their specific clinical realities—but they also see far. They identify patterns and larger problems and make plans to solve them. In other words, nurses see both the forest and the trees. There are vital stories and insights in that interplay. Despite this, nurse voices and nursing knowledge is underrepresented in the general media, to everyone's detriment. In this hands-on workshop, we will take the time to understand key strategies in writing for the general public and then we will practice writing a lead and main idea paragraph that can be turned into an op-ed. We will also discuss resources for moving forward with placing an op-ed in an outlet.