Bruce Smith, MA, ELS
Board-Certified Editor to the Nursing Profession
Gold-standard editing℠ at an affordable price for nursing students, faculty, administrators, and researchers
Gold-standard editing℠ at an affordable price for nursing students, faculty, administrators, and researchers
Bruce Smith can help you create an outstanding document.
BSN & Master’s Students
- course written assignment
- comprehensive examination
- thesis
- capstone paper
PhD-DNP-Postdoc Students
- qualifying examination paper
- dissertation
- DNP final paper
- research article
Faculty & Administrators
- research paper
- grant application
- funding request
- policy document
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Meet Bruce Smith, MA, ELS
Editor ♦ Instructor ♦ Mentor
- Board-Certified Editor in the Life Sciences—one of the few board-certified editors in the United States who specialize in the nursing sciences.
- Instructor, Scientific Writing for Nurses—to our knowledge, the most comprehensive scientific writing course for nurses in the United States.
- Author, Scientific Writing Assessment for Nurses (SWAN), used to assess the scientific writing skill of nursing professors and graduate students.
- Past and current sponsors of Bruce Smith’s courses and services include the American Nurses Association, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, UCSF Nursing Alumni Foundation, the UC Davis Medical Center, and the Firefighters Burn Institute.
Client Comments
The paper looks like a superstar! It is just incredible to me that you can take a document and make it so much better than its original version. I truly appreciate your constructive feedback, your immense knowledge regarding the writing process, the quick turnaround. and most of all your patience with my writing.
—Tina Mammone, PhD, MSN, RN
Bruce has helped with my editing and has guided me through the writing process. Not only has my writing improved but my critical thinking has become more organized. I highly recommend Bruce for any editing and coaching on scientific writing.
—Holly Kirkland-Walsh, PhD, FNP-C, GNP-C, WCNC, Director of Wound Team, University of California – Davis Medical Center
Thank you so much for your help with my comp paper. I really appreciate all the effort you put in. I learned a lot from your comments and suggestions. You are a really great teacher with a lot of patience and are very encouraging. Your students are very lucky, and I am lucky to have the honor to work with you.
—Elizabeth Sin, MSN, RN
Bruce is a phenomenal editor and scientific writer. As a nursing doctoral student, I have personally used his services to help me with my research papers. I have also taken his scientific writing courses, which were absolutely wonderful. His teaching style is engaging and tailored to meet the needs of his students.
—Austin Nation, PhD, RN, Assistant Professor, California State University, Fullerton
Why hire an editor?
- What will editing accomplish?
- Improved Writing Productivity
- Improved Understanding of Subject Matter
- Positive Reader Response
- Greater Academic Success
- Greater Professional Success
- Additional Benefits of Professional Editing
As your editor, my first responsibility is to ensure that the writing quality of your document is excellent. I will examine all aspects of your document’s writing quality and offer recommendations for improvement. In addition, I’ll provide tips for optimizing your writing productivity. Editing your document and optimizing your writing productivity will enable you to complete your document more quickly—with less stress and greater personal satisfaction.
← For more information, click on any of the six tabs to the left.
To write a clear and compelling document, an author must also be productive in the task of writing. As your editor, I’ll be happy to offer tips for increasing your writing productivity, including establishing positive writing habits, using efficient approaches to writing, and dealing with impediments to writing, such as procrastination, lack of confidence, writer’s block, uncertainty about how to proceed with writing tasks, and stress.
Related article: Maximizing Your Writing Efficiency and Productivity
Professional editing enables authors to put their understanding and thought processes under the microscope of careful analysis. For nurse–authors, sharing written content with an editor—before sharing that content with the authors’ intended readers—is invaluable for clarifying the authors’ understanding and written expression. Editorial review greatly increases the likelihood that our readers, whether individual professors or a larger community of nurses, will respond favorably to our written content. In our writing–editing collaboration, we’ll deeply examine the relationships between what you intend to say and the words you’re using to express your understanding. This careful examination will give you a more accurate, more comprehensive understanding of your topic of interest.
For more information on semantic accuracy in writing, see my blog posting, Accuracy in Scientific Writing.
In editing your document, a core objective is that it will be highly readable and compelling. Our goal is that your readers—dissertation committee members, journal readers, or others—will respond enthusiastically to your writing. Your document’s writing quality will strongly influence your readers’ assessment of your document as a valuable contribution to the nursing literature.
As your editor, I’m committed to helping you to write a document whose exceptional quality will reflect your dedication to the advancement of nursing science and practice. The clarity and scientific rigor of your professionally edited document will communicate that you care about your readers as people whose time and judgment you value. In turn, your readers will respect you as an author and your document as the product of meticulous scholarship that is worthy of their attention.
More information:
- Additional Benefits of Working with an Editor
- Characteristics of Good Scientific Writing
- Bruce Smith’s Qualifications and Background
Among my clients, “academic success” spans a broad range of definitions. Many seek academic success in concrete form: a good course grade, writing a successful thesis or dissertation, or publishing a journal article. Most also have academic objectives that are abstract or long-term: development of nursing specialty expertise, advancement of nursing science, actualization of professional potential, or metanoic transformation, to name a few.
If you are a nurse–author who writes with several objectives in mind, please let me know. I can adjust my approach to editing so that in producing an excellent paper, your experience of writing will also serve your larger objectives.
For more information on the relationship between academic writing and academic success, see Scientific Writing and Academic Success.
Nurse educators and professionals agree that for nurses, writing is an essential competence. To develop your proficiency in writing for health care and the nursing sciences, working with a writing mentor can be invaluable. Ideally, your writing mentor should be an expert in teaching writing and in formal writing for the nursing profession. If you are interested in developing your writing competence, let me know. I’ll be happy to serve as your writing coach and mentor.
The process and activities of scientific writing develops several abilities that are essential for nurses and nurse leaders: comprehension and learning ability, analysis and synthetic reasoning, critical thinking, and communicative competence. At a deeper level, the activities of writing can lead to metanoic transformation—a fuller expression of our unbounded inner potential.
To read about additional benefits of working with an editor, click here, or click on any of the titles below.
Improved analytic and synthetic reasoning
Decreased Anxiety, Depression, and Anger
Improved communicative competence
Enhanced use of writing as a technique for research discovery
Bruce has worked extensively with these clients:
- Nursing faculty, administrators, and researchers
- Nurses new to scientific writing
- Nurses returning to school
- ESL and internationally trained nurses
- Nurses with learning differences
- Nurses who are veterans or in military service
Bruce edits in these scientific writing styles:
APA Style
ICMJE Style (URMSBJ)
AMA Style
NLM Style
CSE Style
