Common tips on writing precisely and concisely.
This feedforward is provided under six key points that are critical to the quality of the assignment write-up (rather than the quality of your understanding of the topic).
- Basic points
We should not be correcting basic lack of proof reading. There is often a problem with copying directly from written sources, and changing sentences by using a thesaurus to ‘swop out’ words. This makes the basic English garbled and is very poor practice. Write in plain English, and as simply as you can without using ‘street’ terms.
Some are still struggling with basic referencing of literature. Quotes must reference the page numbers, so that the reader can find it and check that it is a correct quote. Authors’ initials are not used in the main text. Random italics/bold usage are not required and must contain the year (Curtis, 2013). The reference list at the end of the document must be in alphabetical order. Webpages must have a ‘date accessed’. If you don’t know how to do this properly- look at an academic journal paper-they are always correctly done.
- Good introductions and strong conclusions.
Every piece of writing, whether an essay, a short report or a letter, is an exercise in communicating something meaningful to the reader. You want them to learn something, or act on something. You therefore need a strong introduction and an even clearer conclusion. I will deal with the conclusion in the conclusion below
A good introduction has these features:
- A statement of the objectives of the assignment. There is often a confusion between the ‘task’ and the ‘objective’. A task is the activity that you are required to undertake, but the objective is why that activity is a good thing. Don’t mix the two.
- A roadmap of what the assignment will say. A short sentence or two is needed explaining what the reader will experience when reading the assignment. Give the reader a road map, so that the reader can look back to the introduction at any point and see that ‘yes’ you did plan to cover this information.
- A sense of what you will argue and/or conclude. EVEN if you are writing a report, it is still good practice to have an ‘argument’ in mind. The word argument is often misunderstood, so the term ‘golden thread’ works better. Your introduction should contain the ingredients of your main theme (or themes) that ties the whole text together.
In writing the middle section, if you don’t have a lot of time or space to write everything, choose the top three things that are most important for the reader to understand. If there are other things that the reader ‘could’ know, list them and provide references to where the reader can find out more, and then focus your attention on explaining the three good points.
- Garden paths
Most students stick strictly to the structure offered in the assignment brief. Whilst this has created a high level of similar work, it significantly reduces the amount of creativity in the work submitted. Most students provide a fairly descriptive and technical description of the topic in the writing assignment. This is good sound stuff, but most lacked flow- each section or paragraph reads as being very separate from the other, with few or no structuring sentences.
The word ‘text’ is related to the word ‘textile’- the whole document should be woven together, and it needs a pattern or a golden thread that can be easily seen by the reader- a pathway down the garden path (to use another metaphor used in a seminar). The reader needs to know, at the start of your journey, what the path to the end of the garden looks like, and what they are going to see at the end of the path. At each point of the journey- at the end and start of each section, the reader needs to be able to look back to see what happened before (with a little summary or learning point from the preceding section) and a hint (or a transition) to the next section showing how the next section continues building up the whole picture of our journey up the garden path.
- Reading the references
Reading the online learning materials, as background, is important, but reading the books and journals we use in our presentations is critical. We are looking for you to show how you have read ‘a literature’ – this is more than one or two documents, but a whole suite of books. It’s like trying to explain Star Wars having only watched the trailer for the third movie. We want you to watch all the movies, including the prequels, and the director’s commentary. You will still only make relatively few references in your text, but what you DO with that reference, what you SAY will be some much better informed. The students who GET IT, who understand this module enough to express it in an assignment, are those who have read the material we provide. This is also related to how the reading material is expressed in the literature review.
- Interacting with literature
It seems that most people’s understanding of a literature is that it is a description of some of the books and websites that have been mentioned in class. This is not a review of the literature. At Level 6 you will be expected to demonstrate ‘analysis and synthesis’- you should be able to express what a ‘body of literature’ means as a whole. This is not just a description of one definition of the topic you are discussing, but a summary of the most significant writings within the body of literature covered by the key authors related to that topic. This can only come from a working knowledge of the main authors. The lectures give you thumbnail sketches of the literature. Getting this working knowledge takes time, and we are not expecting miracles- but you all start off with the same level of knowledge of the topic, and clearly some do get on and read around the subject before they even get to the writing up stage- READ THE LITERAURE FROM THE START.
However, one of the key threshold characteristics within the assignments I have seen over the years is that weaker students deal with each of the topics suggested in the assignment brief, one after another, in the order mentioned. Some just gave one sentence per topic. This is not writing about a literature, nor is it weaving a text. The stronger assignments were those that took some or all of those ideas and topics and wove their own story, in their own order. Some even showed how their reading had gone beyond the reading lists into new, but still connected areas.
The third aspect of ‘literature’ is that literature should inform the whole assignment, not just one section at the start. In many pieces of writing, ‘literature’ represents ‘that which is already known by (theory building) scientific writers’ against which you were going to compare with ‘that which we learnt in our (empirical) activities and practice. This means that when you write up your observations of your investigations you should be referring back to your literature review- indicating where your observations agree or conflict with the experiences of the literature writers.
Conclusion
Creating a great piece of writing that any reader can understand and that communicates the key points rapidly requires more work than it seems. You may have to write 1,000 words to get to 500 good words. I often write my conclusion first, and then write the middle section and then finally write the introduction. I think through what exactly I want the reader to have learned or be able to act on, and write that into the conclusion. I want all writers to be in control of their writing, and show to the reader that they are in control of their writing. So, if all of the paragraphs in the middle section add up to and create the conditions for the conclusion, there will be nothing that is irrelevant in my writing. If I then write an introduction that tells the reader what is going to happen, there will be no surprises. By the time the reader reaches the end of the document, I will have told the reader what I’m going to say in the text, the middle section will have said it, and in my last concluding words, I will remind the reader what I have said.
Being clear about my objectives for the writing, communicating that to the reader, along with making sure that I the reader always knows what I am doing frees up the reader to be able to concentrate on the references I have provided and the argument I am making.
