Writing About Teeth
Dental students aren’t just busy memorizing the anatomy of the mouth, but they also spend a lot of their time writing a number of research reports to teach others about dental care.
When I asked a friend of mine who is currently in Dental School what types of writing she does, she groans and rolls her eyes. I find out that dental students are enrolled in a variety of classes with the amount of writing spread over a wide spectrum. For example, dental students are required to take a Dental Hygiene 202 class called Critique of Dental Literature. This class hardly ever meets—but requires six papers about professional literature by the end of the term. To my surprise, Dental students spend as much time writing reports as they do experiencing hands-on training during their first two years of Dental School.
Before asking current graduate students about the writing in the Dental field, I was almost positive I would hear that there are not a lot of writing assignments. Dentistry is a very “hands-on” field and I thought the only effective way to learn about the teeth, gums, and related structures of the mouth is to actually do clinical work. “There is much more to dentistry than working with the mouth. Professors have told us the only way to drill in what you learn is to write about it,” explains a current student at the Case School of Dental Medicine. Dentists have to be great with their hands, but they also have to write effectively in order to teach others what they learned.
Dental students are constantly working on research reports—the main form of writing that is involved with Dental School. Students are required to be involved in some form of research, which forces them to think outside of the box. For example, some students are researching molecules that treat chronic inflammation from periodontal disease, heart disease, and arthritis. They do so by performing laboratory experiments and gaining observations and data. By proving that they actually learned something, students are required to write research reports, which are very similar to lab reports in that they explain to the readers the experiment, results, and conclusion. The only difference is that research reports are not broken up into the individual parts like they are in undergraduate school, but instead they are written as one long, continuous report.
Writing reports helps dental students broaden their range of thinking by making them think about things beyond the mouth. Students in dental school are required to memorize loads of information about the anatomy, development, and diseases of the mouth. For this reason, they are guided to look at dentistry in a different light by going a step further beyond this concrete information that they have to memorize. Writing about new information is a way to further explore the field and make important discoveries about dental care and how it relates to the rest of the body. By having a balanced curriculum of writing and clinical experience, dental students get maximum intellectual growth out of their education.
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