Public health professionals are faced with many competencies to master in order to effectively accomplish their professional duties. These competencies, essential roles, and responsibilities have been outlined in several publications, including Institute of Medicine reports. They have focused on accomplishing the core functions of assessment, policy development, and assurance. Recently, the Association of Schools of Public Health Education Committee released Version 2.3 of the core Master of Public Health competencies. There are specific competency lists for biostatistics, environmental health sciences, epidemiology, health policy and management, and social and behavioral sciences and a list of interdisciplinary/cross-cutting competencies across seven overarching domains that include communication and informatics, diversity and culture, leadership, professionalism, program planning, public health biology, and systems thinking.1
There are, however, in addition to these discipline and cross-cutting skills, other competencies that are essential for public health students, graduates, and professionals to be successful. These include job skills that are not unique to public health but applicable to most if not all professions. Some of these competencies include professionalism in the workplace, networking skills, ethics, resume writing, portfolio development, grant writing, and effective communication skills, especially in the area of professional writing.
It is this latter competency, effective professional writing, that has come to my attention as lacking based on my roles as a faculty member and as an associate dean of academic affairs in a College of Public Health (K. L.). This has been echoed by employers of public health graduates as well. Although students may have general writing skills, many of these skills can be improved upon, and certainly specific instruction is often needed for students to enhance their scholarly writing and critical thinking abilities.2
The lack of writing skills of new graduate students is being addressed nationally by the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) through the addition of the new analytical writing assessment portion of the examination. This portion of the examination focuses on the students' ability to both present their perspective on an issue and analyze an argument, which includes assessing their ability to understand, analyze, and evaluate arguments and to clearly convey their analysis in writing.3 Norms are now being developed by ETS for this portion of the GRE.
However, even with a potentially clearer picture of what students' writing skills are at admission, many, if not all students need continued writing practice throughout their degree program. A recent report conducted by the National Commission on Writing for America's Families, Schools, and Colleges4 provided survey findings from 120 human resource directors in major American corporations pertaining to workplace writing. There were several critical findings: (1) Writing is a "threshold skill" for employment and promotion.(p3) As stated in the report, "Writing ability could be your ticket in[horizontal ellipsis] or it could be your ticket out"(p3); (2) those who cannot write and communicate clearly will not be hired and are not likely to last long enough to be promoted; (3) Most salaried workers have some writing responsibility; and (4) as one respondent said, "You can't move up without writing skills."(p3)
While public health institutions were not included among the survey respondents, their findings most likely would have been the same. It is important for programs and schools of public health to do more than pay lip service to this need among their students. In addition to providing more practice for students through the assigning and critiquing of papers and short reports in courses, very often separate seminars or courses in writing are needed.
At the University of South Florida College of Public Health, we recently developed a Professional Skills and Development Workshop Series. The first topic we addressed was improvement of writing skills. The 6-hour interactive workshop focused on improving grammar and writing skills. Major topics included a thorough review of grammar rules and writing style, the thinking and planning skills needed to write well, factual writing, writing persuasively, plagiarism, and writing technical reports. The students worked together in groups and individually on taking factual information and constructing a persuasive argument and writing a technical report.
The students critiqued each other's papers with a writing rubric adapted from the University of Phoenix for content/development, readability/style, and mechanics. At the conclusion of the workshop, the participants evaluated the instructors and the program. Both were highly rated. The students were very interested in additional seminars and/or a course on this topic specifically designed to assist in preparing curriculum vitae, manuscripts for publication, abstracts for professional conferences and meetings, and theses and dissertations.
Public health professionals need a plethora of skills to be successful in order to meet the public health challenges of today and in the future. These skills include communication built on a foundation of good writing skills. We must move past criticizing undergraduate programs or the public school systems for not teaching students to write well. The onus is now on us to make sure our graduates and public heath professionals are not only trained in public health but also in those competencies that will allow them to communicate effectively within their workplace and in the communities they serve.
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