The language of mental health nursing reports: firing paper bullets?

A great deal of the caring work of nursing is accomplished and mediated thr ough language. This paper attempts to characterize some of this language in quantitative and stylistic terms in an attempt to characterize the genre o f nursing report language. Nursing students (n = 26) and graduate nurses (n = 3) viewed a videotape of a person being interviewed by a psychiatrist an d produced written reports. These showed a large proportion of words relati ng to the person and to feelings and needs, compared to existing databases of the English language in general. The language produced by the participan ts also contained many modal or modifying words and is similar to spoken ra ther than written English in terms of the proportion of lexical content. Th ere was much diversity in their descriptions and the vocabulary used to ref er to the client. Graduate nurses showed more scepticism of the evidence pr ovided by the video and advocated more investigation and questioning of the client. The use of standard forms and techniques of expression suggests th at these reports were assembled on a language production line. Finally, we advocate a more systematic approach to educating nursing students about the power of the language they use.