In March 2004 the then-White House Chief-of-Staff and counsel Alberto Gonzales rather dubiously went to the hospital room of John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, to obtain the reauthorization of a domestic wiretapping program.
In this video, after oddly commenting on it being the reporter's birthday (her retort is spot on: "I didn't realize the intel. brief was so far reaching"), Bush is asked a straight-forward question about this issue.
As you can see, he jerks around the question uncomfortably, visiting several adjacent areas including his comfort-blanket alarmist edict that "an enemy lurks".
This is not a Bush-bashing post (the blogosphere is overflowing with them) but the President's style of answering sets me up nicely to talk about what is the number one mistake in essays that I have seen (including on the online hub), made myself and been told about by lecturers. It's the one thing that if a lot of you stopped doing you would see a dramatic rise in your marks.
It is simply what Bush does here: avoid answering the question by talking about stuff vaguely related to the question (domestic security in this example).
The empirical literature has something to say about this: Campbell et al (1998) found that one of the big reasons for poor grades in essays is due to a lack of understanding about what is required of an answer.
Many students think that a good essay is rich in research and information about the area asked - and not much else. In technical terms this is called knowledge-telling. If you do this, stop! You are a naughty person and you have most likely upset some lecturers.
The trick is not to chuck the ingredients at the marker but to serve them up with a nice tasty dish. That is, you need to do some knowledge-transformation.
One of the things the Campbell et al study found was that those getting higher marks "…engaged in processes of reconstruction rather than “knowledge telling”" and "built “arguments” rather than “information” when structuring and drafting their essays".
Imagine the question, 'What (if anything) is wrong with an empiricist view of the mind?' That should have been a question in your coursework: it was a question in my exam.
A bad answer will go off on one, answering the separate, unasked question 'Tell me everything you know about empiricism (and behaviourism and constructivism and domain-generality and nativism and modularity and domain-specificity).' It will waste time talking about theoretical and empirical fluff - made fluffy by the lack of any direct relevance to the question.
A better answer may very well use the same facts that the bad answer used but it will use those facts in service of a point. It will be using evidence to say 'Hey, this study on G-SLI is pretty bad news for empiricism' or whatever. In short, it will be using relevant information to argue. You might think this is forehead-smackingly obvious but your essays on the hub suggest that this point is not translating into your behaviour.
For people wondering how to shift gears from knowledge-telling into knowledge transformation - and let your reader know you are doing this - I would simply add in an explicit statement at the end of each paragraph. Something like, "Taken together, the evidence from these two studies strongly support the empiricist notion of the mind."
Before you start writing your paragraph in exams have an idea of how this sentence will read. This will not only make your writing more relevant but will chuck a grappling hook up the page and lodge in the essay question letting the marker see the link between what you are saying and what they have asked. This might seem a bit clumsy but I would rather be slathered with the clumsy brush than have marks carved off for being irrelevant.
If you answer questions by irrelevantly telling and not relevantly transforming, you're just like Bush. And no one wants that.
In this video, after oddly commenting on it being the reporter's birthday (her retort is spot on: "I didn't realize the intel. brief was so far reaching"), Bush is asked a straight-forward question about this issue.
As you can see, he jerks around the question uncomfortably, visiting several adjacent areas including his comfort-blanket alarmist edict that "an enemy lurks".
This is not a Bush-bashing post (the blogosphere is overflowing with them) but the President's style of answering sets me up nicely to talk about what is the number one mistake in essays that I have seen (including on the online hub), made myself and been told about by lecturers. It's the one thing that if a lot of you stopped doing you would see a dramatic rise in your marks.
It is simply what Bush does here: avoid answering the question by talking about stuff vaguely related to the question (domestic security in this example).
The empirical literature has something to say about this: Campbell et al (1998) found that one of the big reasons for poor grades in essays is due to a lack of understanding about what is required of an answer.
Many students think that a good essay is rich in research and information about the area asked - and not much else. In technical terms this is called knowledge-telling. If you do this, stop! You are a naughty person and you have most likely upset some lecturers.
The trick is not to chuck the ingredients at the marker but to serve them up with a nice tasty dish. That is, you need to do some knowledge-transformation.
One of the things the Campbell et al study found was that those getting higher marks "…engaged in processes of reconstruction rather than “knowledge telling”" and "built “arguments” rather than “information” when structuring and drafting their essays".
Imagine the question, 'What (if anything) is wrong with an empiricist view of the mind?' That should have been a question in your coursework: it was a question in my exam.
A bad answer will go off on one, answering the separate, unasked question 'Tell me everything you know about empiricism (and behaviourism and constructivism and domain-generality and nativism and modularity and domain-specificity).' It will waste time talking about theoretical and empirical fluff - made fluffy by the lack of any direct relevance to the question.
A better answer may very well use the same facts that the bad answer used but it will use those facts in service of a point. It will be using evidence to say 'Hey, this study on G-SLI is pretty bad news for empiricism' or whatever. In short, it will be using relevant information to argue. You might think this is forehead-smackingly obvious but your essays on the hub suggest that this point is not translating into your behaviour.
For people wondering how to shift gears from knowledge-telling into knowledge transformation - and let your reader know you are doing this - I would simply add in an explicit statement at the end of each paragraph. Something like, "Taken together, the evidence from these two studies strongly support the empiricist notion of the mind."
Before you start writing your paragraph in exams have an idea of how this sentence will read. This will not only make your writing more relevant but will chuck a grappling hook up the page and lodge in the essay question letting the marker see the link between what you are saying and what they have asked. This might seem a bit clumsy but I would rather be slathered with the clumsy brush than have marks carved off for being irrelevant.
If you answer questions by irrelevantly telling and not relevantly transforming, you're just like Bush. And no one wants that.
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