RES 6041 Module 1 Scholarly Voice and APA Revision Example

From "Short Staffing Kills Patients" to a Scholarly Claim: Revising an Informal Draft on Nurse Staffing and Hospital Mortality Into Scholarly Voice and APA 7 Style

Student Name

American College of Education

RES6041: Scholarly Writing and Research Strategies

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 12, 2026

Introduction

I direct nursing professional development at a 220-bed community hospital in northeast Ohio, and my dissertation will concern how hospitals prepare charge nurses to make staffing decisions. Before writing about that topic in a doctoral voice, I drafted an informal paragraph of the kind I might put in an email to our chief nursing officer. This paper presents that paragraph, revises it sentence by sentence and explains each change. The aim is to show what scholarly voice requires in practice: precise claims, appropriate caution, an objective stance, bias-free language and APA 7 style.

The Informal Draft

My original paragraph read: "Everyone knows short staffing kills patients. Back in 2002 Aiken proved that every extra patient a nurse has makes it 7% more likely someone dies. Then a huge study in Europe found the exact same thing. Basically, if hospitals don't hire more nurses, people are going to keep dying, and managers who keep cutting staff should be ashamed. The research clearly shows we need ratios now. Nurses are burned out and our patients deserve better."

The paragraph is sincere and, in broad outline, consistent with the research. It is not scholarly. It overstates, generalizes, leans on emotion, gets the citations wrong and makes a policy demand the evidence does not directly support.

Revising the Opening Claim

"Everyone knows short staffing kills patients" appeals to common knowledge and states a causal claim as fact. Scholarly writing names the evidence and states its strength. The revision reads: "Studies conducted in several countries have linked lower registered nurse staffing with higher inpatient mortality." This version replaces everyone knows with the actual source of the knowledge, replaces short staffing with a measurable variable and replaces kills with linked, which matches the observational evidence. Hyland (2005) described such choices as part of a writer's stance: academic writers signal how strongly they commit to a claim, and readers judge their credibility partly by whether that commitment fits the evidence.

Revising the Evidence

"Back in 2002 Aiken proved that every extra patient a nurse has makes it 7% more likely someone dies" contains four problems. Aiken had coauthors, so the narrative citation is Aiken et al. (2002). Observational studies do not prove. The finding concerned surgical patients in Pennsylvania hospitals, not all patients. And the 7% figure describes a change in the odds of dying after admission, not in the likelihood that someone dies. The revision reads: "Drawing on records of 232,342 surgical patients treated across 168 Pennsylvania hospitals, Aiken et al. (2002) found that, for each patient a nurse carried beyond the lightest loads, a surgical patient's odds of dying within 30 days of admission climbed by about 7%." The revised sentence is longer, but every added word narrows the claim to what the study actually showed.

"Then a huge study in Europe found the exact same thing" uses an informal intensifier and claims identical results. The revision gives the scale and the finding: "Across 300 hospitals in nine European countries, records of 422,730 surgical patients showed a similar association, with each additional patient per nurse linked to a 7% increase in the odds of inpatient death within 30 days (Aiken et al., 2014)." The numbers now carry the weight that huge tried to carry.

Revising the Conclusion

"Basically, if hospitals don't hire more nurses, people are going to keep dying, and managers who keep cutting staff should be ashamed" contains a contraction, a filler word, a prediction stated as certainty and a moral judgment of a group. Scholarly voice does not shame; it argues. The revision reads: "These findings suggest that staffing reductions may carry risks for patients, a consideration for hospital leaders making workforce decisions." Suggest and may are hedges, and they are appropriate because the evidence is associational and because staffing effects depend on context. Needleman et al. (2011), for example, found in one academic medical center that mortality risk crept upward with each shift of exposure to registered nurse staffing at least 8 hours short of the unit's planned level, which adds a within-hospital design to the cross-sectional evidence but still does not establish cause.

"The research clearly shows we need ratios now" leaps from an association to a specific policy. Research on staffing levels does not by itself show that mandated ratios are the best way to achieve them. The revision reads: "Whether mandated ratios, flexible staffing models or other approaches best achieve safe staffing remains a separate question." The last two sentences of the original, about burnout and what patients deserve, are cut. The burnout finding is real, since Aiken et al. (2002) reported higher odds of nurse burnout with heavier workloads, but it belongs in its own sentence with its own evidence.

The Revised Paragraph

Assembled, the revision reads: "Studies conducted in several countries have linked lower registered nurse staffing with higher inpatient mortality. Drawing on records of 232,342 surgical patients treated across 168 Pennsylvania hospitals, Aiken et al. (2002) found that, for each patient a nurse carried beyond the lightest loads, a surgical patient's odds of dying within 30 days of admission climbed by about 7%. Across 300 hospitals in nine European countries, records of 422,730 surgical patients showed a similar association (Aiken et al., 2014). These findings suggest that staffing reductions may carry risks for patients, a consideration for hospital leaders making workforce decisions. Whether mandated ratios, flexible staffing models or other approaches best achieve safe staffing remains a separate question."

APA 7 Points Applied

Several APA 7 rules shaped the revision (American Psychological Association, 2020). For a source with three or more authors, APA 7 uses the first author's surname and et al. from the first citation onward. from the first citation. APA 7 writes 10 and every larger number in digits, and percentages use the % symbol after a numeral. Narrative and parenthetical citations are both used, the first when the authors matter to the sentence and the second when the finding does. Contractions are avoided in formal prose. Language about groups avoids blame and labels, which is why managers who keep cutting staff disappeared rather than being softened. In the full paper, headings follow APA levels, with Level 1 headings centered and bold, and the reference list uses hanging indents with DOIs written as URLs.

What Changed and Why It Matters

The revision changed four things. Claims now match the strength of the evidence, causal words have been replaced by associational ones and appropriate hedges have been added. Sources are named precisely, with their populations, so readers can judge how far findings extend. Emotional and moral language has been removed in favor of argument. And APA 7 conventions have been applied consistently. None of these changes weakens the case for attention to staffing. A reader skeptical of nursing advocacy is far more likely to accept the revised paragraph than the original, which is the purpose of scholarly voice.

One more lesson concerns length. Scholarly revision often makes sentences longer, because qualifiers and population details take words. The answer is not to strip them out but to cut elsewhere: the revised paragraph dropped two sentences that added feeling but no evidence, so the whole is only slightly longer than the original while saying far more.

Conclusion

Moving from an informal paragraph to scholarly prose required replacing certainty with calibrated claims, adjectives with numbers and judgments with arguments. The exercise also showed that the informal draft's problems were not only stylistic: two of its claims, that Aiken proved causation and that the evidence demands ratios, were inaccurate. Module 2 turns to the search strategy that will find the rest of this literature.

References

Aiken, L. H., Clarke, S. P., Sloane, D. M., Sochalski, J., & Silber, J. H. (2002). Hospital nurse staffing and patient mortality, nurse burnout, and job dissatisfaction. JAMA, 288(16), 1987-1993. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.288.16.1987

Aiken, L. H., Sloane, D. M., Bruyneel, L., Van den Heede, K., Griffiths, P., Busse, R., Diomidous, M., Kinnunen, J., Kózka, M., Lesaffre, E., McHugh, M. D., Moreno-Casbas, M. T., Rafferty, A. M., Schwendimann, R., Scott, P. A., Tishelman, C., van Achterberg, T., & Sermeus, W. (2014). Nurse staffing and education and hospital mortality in nine European countries: A retrospective observational study. The Lancet, 383(9931), 1824-1830. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62631-8

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173-192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605050365

Needleman, J., Buerhaus, P., Pankratz, V. S., Leibson, C. L., Stevens, S. R., & Harris, M. (2011). Nurse staffing and inpatient hospital mortality. New England Journal of Medicine, 364(11), 1037-1045. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1001025