Professional Writing in the Health Disciplines is a resource for graduate students to enhance their comfort and skills in professional writing. Effective graduate writing has two different components:

• Writing style refers to strategies and techniques that effectively communicate your message (i.e., articulate a thesis and its arguments, and write clear and concise sentences).
• Editorial style refers to specific guidelines for formatting your writing that ensure consistency within the profession (i.e., use APA standard punctuation and heading structures).

The content that in this ebook is a substantive revision of Collins (2016), Professional Writing in the Health Disciplines: A Guide for Graduate Students; however, this revised resource focuses exclusively on the first component, writing style. It does not address editorial format. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) contains some information on writing style; however, it is predominantly an editorial style manual. Please access the current APA manual to align your grammar, writing style, citations and references, tables and figures, and the overall format of your paper with professional editorial standards. There is a brief summary of some of the changes between APA 6 and APA 7 in Appendix A. In addition to the APA manual, you may find the following resources helpful:

• American Psychological Association. (2019). APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/
• Streefkerk, R. (2019). APA Manual 7^th edition: The most notable changes. Scibbr. https://www.scribbr.com/apa-style/apa-seventh-edition-changes/

I have used the editorial style of the 7^th edition of the APA manual. However, the layout of this resource does not lend itself easily to full APA format. Web standards for accessibility also required some stylistic changes (e.g., bolded URLs to make them more visible, multimedia content in multiple formats).

Commitment to Open-Source Resources

Throughout my career, I have been deeply committed to fostering creativity in teaching and learning and to making information freely available through open-source publications like this one. You are strongly encouraged to link to, copy, and repurpose portions of this resource within the boundaries of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. You must cite my work when you use this material, and you may not reproduce any of it for commercial purposes. The one exception to this is use in teaching and training activities (e.g., college and university courses, conference presentations, workplace training) that are not published as stand-alone, for-profit works. For example, you might include the following note if you repurpose an activity example from this ebook.

To access particular sections of each chapter, click on the + sign beside each chapter under the Contents menu (upper left of each page). Also a set of quick links are provided Appendix B which can be used to link directly from course or other resources to materials in this ebook.

About the Author

I was a faculty member in the Graduate Centre for Applied Psychology at Athabasca University for almost 25 years. I am now semi-retired, although I am still actively engaged in my writing in the area of culturally responsive and socially just counselling as well as in open-source resource development. I reference the Faculty of Health Disciplines (FHD) programs in this ebook, because I developed this resource with learners in the Master of Counselling and other FHD programs in mind. However the content of the ebook is broadly applicable to all writers in the health disciplines in other institutions or organizations.

If you discover an error or a broken link in this resource, please contact me at sandracollinsdr@gmail.com.