To the editor

Article Outline

• Copyright

I was saddened to read in the ANA Insider about the death of Edith P. Lewis (Pat) on February 25, 2005. Pat was a former editor of Nursing Outlook as well as Nursing Research and American Journal of Nursing, and is an American Academy of Nursing Living Legend. I got to know Pat at an ANA convention we attended in the early ‘70s when she was Nursing Outlook Editor, and I was a budding scholar, yet to send off my first manuscript. Still a doctoral student, I ran into Pat in a coffee shop and asked if I could talk to her about writing for publication. She was delighted to answer my question, responding with so many yarns about her experiences that I wished I had brought a tape recorder. At subsequent national meetings Pat and I sought each other out, her to talk and me to listen. Most of her advice was anecdotal, as she relayed manifold stories of editing that described with great humor some of the writing blunders that putative authors had rained on her desk over the past months. As I listened, I shook in my boots and vowed with naive self-importance that I would never commit even one of those foolish errors. I know that she talked about the superb articles too, but the ghastly ones were what stuck in my mind as I nervously composed my first manuscripts. I worked my head off to get things as perfect as possible. One of Pat’s pet peeves was authors who were so enormously satisfied with their first draft, exactly as it rolled off the typewriter, that they could not understand just why it was that they needed to improve on perfection.

She also railed at the ones who were sloppy and careless in the conception and follow-through of their ideas. She found that authors often had a magnificent first paragraph, but the rest of the manuscript did not live up to what was promised. She detested sloppy grammar and spelling, and reacted as if it were an insidious virus that, if let loose on the nursing public, would in due course kill off the world’s entire intellect. Forewarned, I rewrote and rewrote, and I still do. As I took all this in, I resolved to stand heads higher than those “lesser authors” that had incurred my mentor’s wrath. I wrote down to my 15th draft. I hired editors whose humiliating remarks on my style and substance took up more room than my original paper. I made sure my defective logic and substandard scholarship were addressed by asking colleagues to read it, and then I actually paid attention to what they said. I massaged my articles down to fine powder before I let them loose out of my unyielding fist.

Twelve years ago, shortly after I had an article published in Nursing Outlook, Pat wrote to me from her long-term care facility in New Haven. Inexplicably, she wondered if I remembered who she was. In her neat script, she shared that she had macular degeneration and could not see what she had written on the page, nor could she read very much anymore because she had to use an electronic magnifying system. But, I read with puffed up pride, she had selected my article to read and wanted me to know how much she liked it.

Pat, wherever you are, I hope you know how much your influence meant to a struggling baby scholar. I hope you know that I regret that I never went to visit you in your long-term care facility. I hope you know how sad I am that you are no longer in this world with me. I hope you also know that what you taught me has never been forgotten, and the advice that you imparted with such unforgettable grace and wit has been passed on to hundreds of my students over the years. When your ideas live on in others, this is true immortality.