“Nurses don’t teach. They educate!” OK, but…. (A style update from the Word Curmudgeon)
I had a few comments but no death threats after my first post, about “nurse writers.” That fact gives me the courage to tackle another grammatical pet peeve of mine. Let me admit, up front, that probably no one else in the world cares about this, and no one else appears to have written about it. This could mean either that I’m really astute or completely wrong.
Education is central to what nurses do. Nurses educate. They work hard, as we do here at AJN, to elevate the image of nursing and nurses in the public eye (as well as the eyes of the medical community, policymakers, and politicians).
It’s understandable, then, that when nurses want to talk or write about something as central to nursing as patient education, they would choose the verb “educate” rather than “teach.”