Some Hints about Academic Writing

You are accustomed to reading things to learn what others have figured out.  You tend to assume they know what they are talking about.  But your goal now is to become the expert yourself.  That means you have to learn to evaluate the knowledge other people share with you to see if it is plausible and justified. And it means that, when you write, you have to justify your own ideas and arguments so that others can evaluate your contribution

Academic texts are the means by which all the "experts" decide what is true or valid or dubious. The journals you read are showing you a large conversation among people who are trying to figure things out. Each author is making a contribution to this collective enterprise and will write his text in a way that tries to persuade readers but that also is clear about the basis for his argument and the limitations of his evidence.

What this means for you as a reader

• When you read, you need to view texts as arguments, not as absolute truths or done deals.
• You need to learn how to evaluate these argument rather than just accepting everything you read as True
• Your evaluation has to be based on the arguments and evidence that the author presents, not just on whether you agree or disagree with the conclusions
• One way to do this is to routinely practice trying out counter arguments for everything you read and compare the merits of the authors argument with the merits of your counter argument

Moral to this story: There are always multiple ways of viewing things and you need to assess them all rather than embracing one as The Truth.

What this means for you as a writer

The academic genre has certain characteristics that you will need to learn. If you are aware of these, you can start to notice how different authors construct these parts, so you can gather techniques that will work for you. For more details on how to pull this off, see my paint-by-number approach to the research report. Here I just give a jist for the strategy.

Step 1. Set the Stage

During your years in graduate school, you will probably be told a million times to review the literature. And when you write a dissertation, you will be told that you need to have explicit attention to the literature. It's not obvious what this means, nor why you need to do it, but the main reason is to set the stage for your own work. Here are the things things you want to accomplish in the introduction to your paper:

a. Let readers know which academic conversation you are participating in.

You cite literature in part to alert your readers to the issues you are interested in, and you do this by showing them which written conversations you are responding to. So, . . .

Instead of this:	Try saying this:
This paper describes findings from a study of a middle school earth science class.	There has been some concern lately about how middle school students understand understand the layers of the atmosphere. For example, in a recent NAEP survey (Smith 2006), students were asked . . ..

In the second example, the author is alerting readers to the issue s/he is interested in and to the conversation (i.e., other scholarly writings) to which s/he is responding.

b. Let readers know that you are aware of other studies that address the same question you are addressing.

You also want to be sure that you don't do a study that has already been done. This is why your advisor will urge you to review the literature before you begin your study. You want to make sure your study adds something new to this ongoing conversation. So when you introduce your study, you also want to let your readers know what is unique your study, and how it adds. So, . . .

Instead of this:	Try saying this:
So I decided to do a content analysis of the textbooks	A prominent hypothesis for explaining this phenomenon is that textbooks are misleading (see, e.g., Brown, 2003). But Thompson (2005) examined the four most widely used textbooks and found . . .. However, Thompson examined only the written text, not the diagrams and other visual aids. This study examines fills that gap by addressing the visual representations in these textbooks.

Notice that, in the second example, you are not showing readers that your study is different from other studies and adds a new and unique piece to the on-going conversation and collective task of figuring this out.

When you finish setting the stage, your readers should know (a) what problem or issue you are addressing, (b) what on-gong conversation you are responding to, (c) what your contribution will be to this conversation, and (d) how your contribution differs from and adds to the contributions that others have made.

Step 2: Describe your own study

Once the stage is set, you can now give the details about your study. Typically this is done in a section called "Methods." Here you want to say

(a) who or what you studied (e.g., 2 5th grade teachers in Topeka, 3 second-grade special ed students in East Lansing, 4 middle school earth science textbooks, the math standards frameworks from three states, namely Michigan, North Carolina and Texas). This collection is called your sample. The reason it has this label is that you are never able to study all the cases that exist. YOu don't have resources to study all the students in the country, or all the state frameworks, or all the textbooks. Even if you could study all the cases that exist today, these will change tomorrow. States will revise their frameworks, and textbook publishers will revise their texts. So you always consider the cases you study to be sampled from a larger universe that is not directly accessible.

(b) Why you selected these particular people/documents/whatever (e.g., I sought frameworks from states whose rhetoric leaned more toward basic skills vs those whose rhetoric leaned more toward concepts, I wanted students who are are struggling with reading, I wanted a district with high teacher turnover, etc.) This rational should be related to the problem you are addressing, that is, you should be choosing these cases because they will help reveal something you want to learn more about)

(c) How you selected this sample. Your method of selecting is important because it alerts readers to whether your sample is likely to be similar to other cases in the universe of possibilities. For example, if you say you took your students from a school that has a working relationship with the university, then the context of your study may not reflect the contexts of the larger population of schools. If you selected state frameworks that were willing to give you permission to visit and interview them, these may not be representative of other states who are more hostile to researchers. So you need to alert readers to the methods you used to find your cases.

One thing to realize here is that every sample has weaknesses. Your purpose here is not to trick your audience into believing you have better evidence than you really have, it is to help them estimate the limits of your evidence. At the same time, your tone is not that of a confessional. All evidence has limits, so you needn't be apologetic. You just want to be descriptively accurate.

(d) What sort of data you collected from your sample. Here you want to describe for readers what sort of questions were in your interview or questionnaire, or what sort of scoring scales you used to code documents or lessons. Show some sample items to illustrate your strategy.

(e) how you analyzed your data. Here you need to describe any further schemes for creating scales or categories and any statistical tests you used or any qualitative analysis strategies you used. If you have any way of knowing how reliable your strategies were, that is, whether someone else would have coded things the same way you did, you should describe those here too.

Step 3: Describe what you found out as a result of the above

This section of your paper is often called the Findings section. It's hard for me to give advice about this because findings are so various. One general rule of thumb is to first lay out the most descriptive stuff you have, and then move to patterns and interactions. So, for instance, you might start with a simple table of how many people said "a" vs "b," or how many passed your test or were members of one group or another. Then move to patterns, like that the people in one group were more likely to say "a" whereas the people in the other group were more likely to say "b." When you get to patterns, be sure to show some examples of the pattern you are describing.

Step 4: Summaries, Conclusions and Discussions

Now that you've laid out everything you did and everything you found out, you are ready to close out your paper. There are three types of closing sections--summaries, conclusions, and discussions. Generally speaking, a "summary" is the narrowest closing section in that it permits you to do nothing more than summarize what you already said in the findings section. The "conclusion" allows you to stretch out a bit--to talk about how your findings back to the original issue that you mentioned in your introduction and to say something about what these findings suggest. The discussion stretches even further and allows you to meander about in the general issue. Each type subsumes the other. Usually a conclusion also includes a summary, and usually a discussion also includes a summary and a conclusion. Here are some samples of the kinds of sentences that will appear in each type of closing section.

Summary	Conclusion	Discussion
In this study, we examined the visual representations of the atmosphere in 4 widely used middle school earth science textbooks. Judges who rated these representations found that 2/3 of them were misleading.	The findings suggests that textbooks may have a greater role in student misconceptions than was previously suspected.	Still, it is a bit implausible that student misconceptions could ensue only from these representations when the text itself makes the concept more clear and when tests of teacher knowledge suggest that they also understand the concept. The findings raise questions about how these various sources of knowledge interact to influence student thinking.

Step 5: Submit your paper to a friendly critic

Even if you believe you've been very clear about what the issue is, how your contribution follows from other contributions, how you did the study, and so forth, you will discover that readers will be confused about what you did, or what you were studying, and they may not see how you arrived at the conclusion you reached. So find someone who is not too familiar with what you've been doing (that means, not your housemate or soulmate, with whom you've shared every anxiety you've had throughout the process, and not your advisor, who has consulted with you at every step of the way). Ask that person to read the paper and respond with whatever questions or thoughts or suggestions they have. If they have questions, you now know what you failed to mention. If they have suggestions that imply they misunderstood what you were doing, that also implies that you failed to be clear about what you were doing. Use these comments to clarify all the sections of the paper.

Step 6: Submit your paper to a second friendly critic

Do Step 5 again with someone else.

©Mary Kennedy, 2006