More on writing

“Formal writing differs from informal writing in being concise, clear, simple, scholarly, polite, careful, precise, and scrupulously grammatical…” (O’Shea, 2000, p.1).

Nicely put.

Comparisons

clspeace @ Flickr

Another thing I picked up on from the essays before MediaMax imploded: be careful with comparisons, which inevitably crop up all over the place.

Saying "Females performed worse for Condition A" is meaningless because what other group did they perform worse than? The monkey wizards?

While we're talking about "Condition A", I should mention I don't like refering to conditions by a letter because it is as clear as a brick to the reader. Give it some meaninful name.

So all together, "Females performed worse in the Banana Magic condition than the Monkey Wizards.

The first bite of an essay

Don't know about you, but I find the first taste of food to be the best. It's probably a combination of the hypothalamus getting its way, some neural adaptation thereafter and a bit of the primacy effect, if we are stripping down and getting really geeky. Science aside, I probably make my "Mmm, great", "Yeah, not bad" or "Ergh! Who cooked this?" after this first bite or two. It's the same with essays: the introduction will give your reader an immediate flavour for your mark and they'll spend the rest of the time they're reading making tweaks to that figure (this is what every lecturer I have ever asked has intimated).

If you start poorly your essay will have to work damn hard to improve the marker's opinion of it. Send them reeling with a confusion blow from the start and they don't really recover. On the other hand, a punchy, crisp and explicit introduction will elevate the marker's opinion of you such that occasional weaknesses are excused and any confusion you bestow upon the reader is lessened because they still have the thrust of your argument ringing in their ears from the introduction.

I think the perfect introduction has four parts and is super-concise (fewer than 150 words)

1. A sentence to introduce the general area.
2. A sentence or two to introduce the specific issue at hand.
3. An idea of the route you are going to take or any definitions that need settling
4. A punchy statement of where you are going to end up.

I'll illustrate these with an example introduction to this mock question:

"Who is the best fighter in the University of Bristol Experimental Psychology Department?"

(1) Hand-to-hand combat between psychology lecturers is common (2) Yet, the question of who is the best fighter at the University of Bristol remains largely unspecified. (3) By evaluating a large corpus of fight data and accounting for the heavy bias in Stollery's (2007) meta-analysis (towards Stollery) (4) it will be argued that although Hood (weapon: short-sleeved shirt), Scott-Samuel (weapon: the bitingly acerbic comment) and Mike from CSG (weapon: dangerous mugshot) were strong, Bowers emerges as the clear winner with his ability to 'seriously confuse from fifty feet'.

Or more seriously:

Which theory do you think offers the best account of consciousness?

(1) Consciousness presents science with its most frustrating problem because it is both so familiar but so tough to explain; (2) nevertheless, a number of theories have been put forward. (3) By evaluating some of these theories against their ability to accurately and parsimoniously explain a large corpus of evidence, (4) a number will be rejected in deference to an adaptive representational model of consciousness, where temporal information integration is fundamental.

So, remember the reader's first taste of your essay is very important. Given that they will probably have read lots of essays before getting to yours, 'Tango slap' your reader into sitting up and paying attention to your sharp, punchy start.

How to note: the nitty gritty

toke @ Flickr

We have established a few things for note-taking. First, know what a course is about. This is vital for restricting your revision to the relevant stuff and being able anticipate questions that might be coming. Second, it's best to start off your research with a review paper or several introductions to recent papers. I am working on a post which has all the review references I ever read in one place. Sit tight for that one, it's gonna be useful, especially for people who have had a rather too leisurely Easter break.

Before that, some more on note-taking.

Use your own words. Copying swathes out of paper is tempting because of the illusion of progress it creates. There are several problems with this. First, revision is reduction, so you are immediately failing in this respect.

Second you may understand the material now as the implicit logic is still kicking about in your minds from reading the paper, but when you revisit the notes in a month's time you'll kick your past self when the logical steps are not there and you simply have to go back to the original paper, obviating the initial work.

The other thing about using your own words is that you are exploiting the generation effect, the fact that when you produce information (as opposed to just reading and copying it) you remember it better (e.g. De Winstanley & Bjork, 2004). Converting key ideas into metaphor is a step further because of the deeper level of processing required, which better ossifies the ideas in memory.

Next, shorthand or prose? Prose. We all think we have a special shorthand that saves us massive amounts of time but which we later struggle to decipher. There's a lovely bit in Extras when Darren is jotting down the name of Andy's proposed show in his special shorthand:

Darren Lamb: What's it called?
Andy Millman: "When the Whistle Blows".
Darren Lamb: [writing] "When the W Blows".
Andy Millman: Don't just write "W" you'll forget what the W stands for.
Darren Lamb: "When the Wind Blows".
Andy Millman: "Whistle"!
Darren Lamb: Got it. [writing]
Darren Lamb: "W" equals "Wind".
Andy Millman: "Whistle"!
Darren Lamb: [writing] "When the Whistle Blows".

"Don't just write "W" you'll forget what the W stands for" is good advice for revision too. In your notes you should write in prose. Or at least prose in lists. Short hand is bad for laying down logic, it's bad to come back to, as Darren illustrates, and what's better, practising writing just before exams or sharpening your nib for months in the lead up to them?

So 1) use your own words and 2) use them in prose.

The online hub

bfionline @ Flickr

You will have spent a long time on your essays, familiarising yourself with an area to exam-level detail. Fortunately, you only have to do an essay per course for coursework. Unfortunately, for exams you need to know lots more. One shortcut to familiarising yourself with all this other material is to read each others essays.

Last year many of the Level 3 psychologists compiled their essays on an online hub. Essays were uploaded along with the mark they got, any important comments made by the marker and without any identifying information.

The beauty of this is that you can quickly use the legwork done by others to get to a good level of understanding. In addition, you should be able to improve your own communication skills by noting in others what is effortless to read and what is horrible.

It's a great little resource and last year's was very successful but its power rests on you lot uploading your essays. To do this, first, remove your name from the doc, add your mark in a nice fat font size at the top (plus any marker comments you deem necessary), make sure the document is saved with the essay question in the file name and then head here to MediaMax and enter these details :

username: brain_milk
password: i/l/i/k/e/s/h/a/r/i/n/g
[remove all the "/" - this is to avoid bots]

After this navigate your way to right folder, or create your own if I have left one out, and upload.

Do make an effort to upload guys and gals, we all found it was a great thing to have last year...

Metaphor

The dry business of acquisitions and mergers is given drama and clarity by this simple visual metaphor.

Those of you with a keener literary eye will have noted my heavy sprinkling of metaphor/analogy in my writing (and perhaps unintentionally comic occasions where they are extended beyond their elastic point, so they only lie limp in my text looking a bit silly [like now]).

Anyway, it's deliberate. Metaphors clear the corridors of our thinking and allow easy passage for arguments to glide down. They also improve your writing considerably.

Cognitive and Philosophy Wizard Daniel Hofstadter (and also author of the first book to ever be sold on Amazon.com) has called them "the core of cognition" (in Gentner et al., 2001. For pedants out there he was strictly speaking talking about analogy, but metaphor is a type of analogy).

Consider the differences between these two attempts to capture what the word 'greenwashing' means:

1. Greenwashing is a term that is used to describe the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service

2. Greenwashing is when you "put a lettuce in the window of a butcher's shop and declare that you are now 'turning vegetarian'" (John Grant)

Although the first is more accurate, the second gives you the same gist but with much more satisfaction, clarity and gumption.

The reason I bring it up is because metaphor is not only for use over in the English department. Science papers and books frequently employ it to satisfying and "aah, now I get it!" effect.

At its best a metaphor should promote understanding beyond that of literal text, affording a deeper grasp on the issue. At its worst metaphor is deployed for flowery effect at the expense of crisp communication.

There's a paper I remember (but not well enough to cite) that was explaining the drawbacks of neuroimaging's resolution and it likened the situation to flying over a city a night, being able to see the lights below but being completely oblivious to the economics, politics and culture going on beneath.

This isn't just showing off because it shoehorns understanding and makes metaphorical predictions (we need to get down at the grassroots (cognitive and neuronal) levels to understand these other things).

In exams, slipping in a metaphor every now and again can pull the point you are making into sharp focus, significantly polish your communication and enhance the marker's understanding. Now, you may think I am getting a bit ahead of myself suggesting this as a way to improve your writing because it's irrelevant right now (you want to worry about that in May/June).

It isn't. In revision, using metaphor can greatly enhance your own understanding and memory of something because it forces you to chuck an idea about between two different modes. As a result it forces you to understand it at a deeper level, and when you codify at a deeper level you remember better (Slamecka and Graf, 1978). And, the really good ones should let you think more creatively and critically, which you'll need for the top marks.

When you are writing your notes try and think up useful metaphors and analogies because it will enliven the process, forge deeper memories and make you better thinkers.