These notes are provided to assist students. They include my personal philosophy of education and a heap of tips. I have tried to answer the questions my students ask. The page is a resource base for use as the year proceeds.
This page does not consider study skills. For online information on study skills I recommend the Allen and Unwin -eStudy Centre.
You will only succeed if you can write well. This is true regardless of the subject you study. You should deliberately work to improve your writing. Improving your writing improves your thinking.
There are two aspects of your writing “style” to consider:
It takes lots of practice to develop your academic style. You must first become conscious of the need to work on your style, and then work on it over a period of years. The place to start is to be clear about what is required of you - to be clear about the product you must produce. I cannot improve on the Allen and Unwin page What is expected in a tertiary essay. I quote a little section:
"The tertiary essay differs from what you may have written in secondary school in a number of ways:
Very few academic courses will specify the particular presentational style you must use. Some do and save the student some thought: however, that is a pity for it denies the student the opportunity to reflect on important matters. The best practical way to proceed is to:
Popular generic styles include the three below, and you should chose one and stick with it:
Academic journals specify a style for their authors and you might simply follow a journal from your discipline that appeals to you. The section below on how to do references sets out some links to formal style manuals that you will need to investigate. Probably science students will prefer the Chicago Style, and humanities and business students will prefer APA.
Modern Languages Association Style
American Psychological Association Site
Perdue University Guide to Grammar
Online English Grammar (comprehensive)
You must use a dictionary to check all the important words in your essay. Be precise, avoid generalisations.
Dictionary of Philosophical Terms
There is plenty of rubbish on the internet. But, there are also many valuable resources. You must learn to:
Style sheet for internet resources
Citation guide for internet resources
Why must students follow the rules when they write essays? What are academic standards and why are they important? When students understand the reasons why we have particular requirements, they write better essays.
There are thousands of books on essay writing. Why do we need another article? Because few books focus on the reasons why we have academic standards. Once you understand the reasons behind the rules, it all makes sense.
When you write an academic paper you are learning to contribute to humankind’s advancing knowledge in an academic discipline.
Intellectual disciplines are today very fragmented, but they connect together historically. Many of our disciplines date from ancient Greek times, 2,500 years ago. They are the intellectual history of human kind. You will recognise major traditions, such as:
An academic discipline is an historical development of ideas. Working within the discipline, colleagues produce and test new ideas. At conferences and in academic journals, new ideas get tested. Ideas with merit live on and are further debated, the rest are consigned to history. (Not every “subject” is an academic discipline. Some are mixtures of disciplines - more on this later.)
As a student, you learn to participate in an intellectual discipline. You learn how to produce new ideas that relate to what has gone before, and to present them for criticism. You learn to do this by writing.
The standards for academic writing in each discipline are those that are currently accepted by the participants in the discipline as being proper.
Standards differ from discipline-to-discipline and from time-to-time. You must learn the current standards for your discipline. Three things follow from this:
As a student you will simultaneously learn:
Subjects like business management, tourism, public policy, and commercial practice, are hybrids. They bring together several academic disciplines that contribute to our understanding of practical things. Often such subjects they have a core that relates to specific practical matters. For example in "policy analysis" you learn about how to draft policy and present it to decision-makers and there are debates about that. In business management you learn about business planning, organising, and control. These practical cores are sufficiently covered in introductory courses. In advanced courses in "blended subjects" you need to work within a real academic discipline and consequently students find themselves working in philosophy or psychology. Often they are not well prepared for this.
Practically oriented subjects are not new in universities. The balance of disciplines in them has always been contentious. According to Whitehead, in 1316 a college was founded at Cambridge, England, for the special purpose of providing clerks for the King's service' (Whitehead, 1932, page 138). He wrote in 1929 that universities have trained clergy, medical men, lawyers, and engineers, and “business is now a highly intellectualised vocation” (ibid, page 138).
It is difficult for students to see the separate disciplines when they study subjects that draw upon several disciplines. This can make such subjects more difficult than students' expect.
Consider the example of business management. It is a difficult subject for students because it is often about something other than practical business management. For example, if you study motivation in a business management course you soon fall back on the topic of motivation in the discipline of psychology. Unless you study the theories of motivation in psychology your understanding is going to be very limited. But, to study the theory of motivation in psychology requires that you study much more in the discipline of psychology.
Some people would argue that economics is a hybrid subject – it is really about psychology, ethics, and politics. Aristotle thought politics was actually ethics, and he was largely right. Likewise, public policy is economics, sociology, ethics and social science research methodology.
There are some subjects that are not discipline based – they are directed at very specific practical skills. A good example is business communication. This is a valuable practical skill, but it is not an intellectual discipline. Much of medicine is like this, where is the skill is problem solving.
Because you are learning two different things, there are two sorts of questions asked of students:
At the start of your degree, you frequently get questions where parts (a) and (b) deal with your understanding of the discipline and parts (c) and (d) ask you to contribute to the discipline. Such questions have a logical structure. The basic approach for questions about practical situations or case studies is:
When you write about case studies or examples, remember your lecturer is trying to teach you about the theory not about your particular application of the theory (that is, not about the case itself). The essay topic "Business Planning in the National Bank" is about the theory of business planning, it is not about the National Bank. The bank just provides us with material upon which to consider the theory. Of course once you begin to work for the National Bank, the focus of the essay changes.
If you understand the purpose of the rules, you will have no trouble writing according to the required standards for your subject. Remember the rules are about the standards that help advance the discipline. Which means they relate to:
The idea that there are no right or wrong answers and that the students ideas are as good as anyone else's ideas, is nonsense. Those involved in a discipline know what is right and what is wrong, and your task as a student is to join them in this understanding. This is why your teachers are teaching you, and not the other way round. You are being asked to join the mainstream of human thought and eventually to contribute to it.
Niblett, W.R. Subjectivity and Standards. Pages 413 – 432, in Peters R.S. (editor) Psychology and Ethical Development. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974.
Peters, Richard S. Ethics and Education. London: Allen and Unwin, 1966.
Peters R S. (Editor) Education and the Development of Reason. London: Routledge.
Peters, R.S. Education and the educated man. Pages 1 – 16 in Dearden R. F., Hirst P.H. & Peters R.S. A critique of current educational aims. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1975 (revised edition). Kegan Paul, 1972.
Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding : Volume I. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Valle Verde Library.
Combating Cybercheating - Resources for Teachers. http://www.epcc.edu/vvlib/cheat.htm
Whitehead, A.N The Aims of Education and other essays. London: Williams & Norgate Ltd, 1932.
Wilson, John. Authority in educational relationships. Journal of Moral Education, Vol 29(3), pages 323 – 337, September 2000.
Why do we have the particular rules we have? Let us consider some common mistakes and say why they are mistakes:
You need to understand why each of these common mistakes is an inadequacy. The rules are not arbitrary. Each rule relates directly to your learning to perform in an academic discipline. Rules relate to:
Let us consider the examples and see how they relate to one of these three things.
Here is a list of errors that appear in student essays. I have tried to say why they are wrong in each case referring to the comment above.
Changing a few words in a sentence that is taken from elsewhere. This is, in effect, plagiarism. It is so easy to avoid. You will earn better marks if you:
Once you get used to writing this way you will not need to “rehash” others’ work.
“In-text” references must be recorded using a system that is considered appropriate for your discipline.
The problem with plagiarism, and close paraphrasing, is not that you are stealing others work. Not attributing others’ work is a problem because it shows you are not relating properly to the discipline. You are failing to correctly identify the place in the intellectual tradition that is your entry point to the debate. Hence, you fail to establish the base for your work.
You must understand the required reading before you write. You cannot work direct from it to the essay draft. In other words, you need to know the discipline before you can begin to contribute to it. “Know” here means, “have understood and made your own”.
With superficial reading you do not appear to be a participant in the discipline.
This relates simply to communication. You cannot advance the discipline if people cannot easily read what you have written. It may also relate to clarity of thought, or the lack of such clarity.
This relates to communication.
This relates to communication. You cannot advance the discipline if people cannot easily read what you have written. When you write in an academic discipline you are writing for an international, academic audience. It also relates to being accurate.
Sweeping generalisations are the result of poor thinking skills, and perhaps an inadequate grasp of the subtleties in the discipline. If you want to advance some sweeping conclusion find it already published in the literature, and cite someone else’s conclusion (that is, provide authority).
You must ground your writing sufficiently in the discipline. To show this you must list for others the papers that you have considered (used) in the development of your ideas. You must show that you have considered everything that is relevant to what you have written. But, you do not list everything you have read that is relevant to the general topic.
Plagiarism has many definitions. The key practical idea of plagiarism is that you take someone else’s words and use them, suggesting or implying that they are your own. So why is this wrong? Several reasons are commonly given:
These reasons may be "true" but they do not get to the heart of the matter. Indeed, some lecturers start to think it is all about honesty and beat foolish drums.
The real problem of plagiarism is that the student is not going to learn about their discipline. Students who plagiarise do not see themselves as entering a discipline with standards. For them, essay writing is not really about learning something valuable.
There are really two failures in such writing:
The ironic part of it is, that once students understand what academic learning is, they find it easy to proceed in the proper way. More>
This is a list of the best sites from around the world.
http://startup.curtin.edu.au/study/writing.html
http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/essay.html
http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/advise.html
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/arch/ugrad/bos/essays.htm
http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~mm/academic_writing.htm
http://www.bham.ac.uk/english/bibliography/students/essay.htm
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/local/doc/essays/essays.html
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ics/study3.htm
http://www.columbia.edu/~zms2/teaching/essay.html
http://www.modhist.mq.edu.au/teaching/writing.htm
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sources/
Your grades will improve if you learn to read!
Many students struggle on without ever thinking about how they read. You need to learn to read before you can learn to write and you need to develop efficient ways of reading. It does not take long to learn the basics of real student reading. But, reading is a skill, and like all skills you need to practice. You can practice on any text. Work through the notes below and remember the key is to practice the right way. Practice does not make "perfect". Practice makes "permanent”.
Before you begin to read you should know why you are reading the text.
You may read:
These notes are about serious reading to help you get good grades and to gain wisdom. Always be clear on why you are reading.
Serious reading is what you do when you want to learn. Before you can write an assignment or an essay, you need learn about the subject. It is vital that you understand two things before you even begin to read: · Why are you reading this particular item? · What are your goals in reading this item? Most usually, for students, you will read an item because it has been set as a part of your course, and your goal will be to learn from the work sufficient for you to complete your assignment or examination. Key techniques For serious reading, there are three different tasks that relate to:
These are the things to do when you first pick up a new book:
Select the text that is relevant to your purpose. You may have to jot down the key works that are important to you, use chapter and sub-headings, and consult the index. You must be "active" when you read for understanding. Also, develop a strategy to help you remember what you are extracting from the text. There are many approaches to this task, but devise or fine some strategy that suits you.
Here are some tips to assist you achieve good marks through distance education. These ideas are based in my observations of student’s who succeed and some research findings.
First, you need to understand how you are assessed. You are assessed in different ways in a course and quite different skills are needed to succeed well in:
Students who do well often spend a lot of time thinking about how they are assessed and working out what it will take to “beat the system”.
Your lecturer will have provided you with a detailed account of the assignment. This will cover two things:
If there is a mark schedule or guide available - this will be the most vital document you have. You must be absolutely clear about what will earn you marks.If something is worth 20% of the marks it should take 20% of your effort, and use 20% of the allowed words.
Once you have mastered the assignment, you can set out to master the “course content”. The course content is the theory that is the base of your course and your assignment. These are the essential ideas that you must discuss or apply. You will master the theory most easily if you are conscious of its use in your assignment. Make notes on the theory as you proceed through the course content. Talk about the ideas with others and memorise the key facts that you extract from the material. Now, write the first draft of your assignment. Always you will find you have more to say than the word limit allows. Part of the exercise is to be selective and concise. Revise your draft several times seeking to:
Examinations require that you recall the theory. Hence, you must memorise the theory. Start early on this task and use all the techniques you can to assist your memorising. Material that is understood is the easiest to memorise. Notice how the skills used to prepare for an examination are different from those used to prepare an assignment.
A good way to assist understanding is to read the same theory in different textbooks.
Good luck.