In flight from the banal

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I've been marking lots of summative essays! (Yeah, thanks everyone for setting me up with that.) One thing I've found myself writing on a lot of feedback sheets is the comment: 'lacks academic bite'. What do I mean? How can you make your essay-writing more toothy?

In studying psychology at university level, you are encouraged to read widely and to consult different types of material. The things we suggest reading can include journalistic treatments of psychological matters, such as in an online news service or a pop science book. What your lecturers expect in a summative essay, though, is something a bit more academic. Writing in an academic style can be dull, but it doesn't have to be. What academic writing should always be is concise, intelligent, objective and well-referenced. We've already discussed a lot of these issues, but here are a couple more thoughts.

Firstly, when you read a 'journalistic' source, you will often find that the author takes some time to set the story in historical context. In academic writing, it isn't always a good idea to go too far with this, mainly because it takes up space which you could turn to better use in making your main arguments. If you're writing an essay on sex differences in intelligence, for example, you don't need to itemise all the historical developments in IQ testing. You will probably find that this information can be summarised in a line or two.

Another tip is to aim for some sort of striking introduction. You could start your essay by saying something like 'Psychologists have debated sex differences in intelligence for many years', but I might yawn. Why not choose an opening that shows that you understand the basic point and are ready to take it further? 'Although sex differences in intelligence have been of concern to psychologists for many years, there is beginning to be a consensus that any such differences are more likely to obtain in specific rather than general intelligence.' Immediately you have made a statement of interest, and can begin to build an argument.

Another difference between 'pop' sources and academic ones is fairly minor, but contributes to the impression your assignment makes. Language like 'the English psychologist Dr Charles Fernyhough, from Durham University' may go down well with a general readership, but in an academic context it is a waste of words. Chatty though we (hopefully) are on the corridor, in the world of summative assignments and journal articles (which should always be the model for your academic writing), we are not on first name terms. If you want to cite me, Fernyhough (2010) will do just fine.

Writing a killer first paragraph

Let's swap roles for a moment. You're a lecturer staring at a pile of 80 summative essays. Each one has to be carefully and fairly evaluated; the whole task is going to take days. You pick up the first essay from the pile and start reading. What's going to spark your interest? What's going to make the next twenty minutes or so enjoyable for you?

Successful writing is all about grabbing the reader's attention, and keeping it. Good writing is confident and sure-footed; it says, 'Listen to me, I've got something important to say.' A reader's impressions start being established in the very first lines. A professional marker will, of course, stick with an essay (good or bad) doggedly to the end, but if you don't get that first paragraph right, you're missing a chance to establish a good first impression.

So it's worth investing some time in that introductory paragraph. The introduction should encapsulate the whole essay and your arguments in a nutshell. It should sketch out the territory and give clear markers about where your essay is going to go. It should be a microcosm of the essay as a whole, and above all it should establish your authority in being able to answer the question in an interesting, informed, intelligent way. Ask yourself: if I had to answer this question in only a few sentences, what would I write? This should be your introduction.

Let's imagine that you're answering the following question: What can children suffering from autism and the case of Genie tell us about how typically developing children acquire language?

Here's a good introductory paragraph for this essay (with acknowledgements to my colleague Elizabeth Meins):

Acquiring fluency in their native language is something that most children do effortlessly in the first three years of life. Does this mean that the ability to acquire language is innate, or is the rich social and linguistic interaction that children experience from birth responsible for this rapid acquisition? Since ethical constraints mean that it is impossible to test these hypotheses experimentally, researchers have relied on language deficits in atypical cases to try to establish the mechanisms involved in normal language acquisition. The language skills of children with autism and those who have experienced severe early social deprivation suggest that there may be different developmental determinants and pathways for specific aspects of language (e.g., syntax and pragmatics). Data from atypical cases suggest that the early ability to engage in joint attentional episodes and to grasp symbolic representation may be essential for the full acquisition of the major defining feature of human development: language.

What's good about this introduction? For a start, it has a certain amount of academic gravitas. It is not wordy or jargonistic or obscure, but it nevertheless reads as though it were written by someone who knows what she's talking about. This author has engaged with her discipline, read lots of academic work in the subject, and is showing that she knows how to speak the lingo.

This paragraph also gives the reader a clear idea of where the essay is going. It doesn't needlessly duplicate information that is also given later, but it does provide a sort of gloss or commentary on it. It says: this is the kind of essay you're going to get, and this is why it's going to be interesting. It touches on the main points of the argument that is going to be made (i.e., that we can learn about typical language acquisition by looking at how joint attention and symbolic representation are affected in atypical cases) in a way that makes its agenda very clear.

Here, then, are a few tips for writing an intro:

1. Don't simply repeat the title. 
There's nothing worse than reading an essay that simply regurgitates the essay question in a boring way. Show how you intend to address the question, or point out some interesting fact about the question, or comment on it in some way—but don't just give the reader the question again. It's the classic opening gambit of he who does not know what to say.

2. Think 'funnel'. 
A good plan is to start with the general and move to the specific. Why is the study of language acquisition important? Because, for one thing, language is supposed to be a quintessentially human characteristic. Why should we spend time looking at atypical development? Because, generally speaking, the study of atypical psychology can tell us a lot about typical psychology. Move from general points to specific points that set up your argument, just as the mouth of a funnel narrows towards its base and gathers the material in. (See the clip below for more on the funnel metaphor.)

3. Don't waste words on banal, subjective or journalistic openings.
"Memory is one of the most fascinating aspects of human psychology." Well, excuse me while I yawn loudly. There are plenty of people out there who are willing to write bland pop psychology; don't let yourself be one of them.


4. If you need to define terms, then make it interesting. 
Another perennial switch-off is the essay that begins by defining, in a boring, kid's-encyclopaedia kind of way, the main terms and concepts that are going to be used. Now, it might be extremely important that you define terms, especially if common usages of those terms are ambiguous, or if the concept has a specificity in psychology that it doesn't have in everyday speech. But save it for later, or at least do it in a way that doesn't send your reader to sleep.

5. Don't repeat yourself.
Don't duplicate material that will appear later in the essay. You will give the impression that you are not in control of your material; that the essay is writing you, rather than the other way round. Comment on what is to come; sketch out the argument with a few deft strokes; point to a historical connection or an interesting quote, or a news story that is relevant to the issue. But don't waste words saying things twice.

6. Avoid the dull road map. 
Yes, your essay should signpost where your argument is going and tell the reader how you are going to get there. But avoid the intro that says 'First I will do this. And then I will do that. And then I will do the next thing.' Those essays are Dullsville. You can go there if you want, but don't leave your map for us to read.

Finally, you might find the following clip useful:

Structuring an argument

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Last time we looked at how to come up with a simple structure for an essay using words and pictures. This should have allowed you to get your ideas really clear in your head, in a structure that makes it very obvious where any gaps are and where you need to go back and do more reading and research. The second part of this process involves ordering your ideas into a proper essay plan, and making those crucial decisions about what should go in and what should be left out.

I'm going to ask you to do something rather counter-intuitive at this stage. I suggest that the first thing you do is look back at your word limit for the essay. Word limits are a necessary evil (we'll be talking some more about them in later posts). But they can also be a force for the positive, and here's how.

Let's say you've been given the following question for your assignment: Critically evaluate Theory X as an explanation for Phenomenon A.

You have 1500 words to write an essay on this topic. Question: how many paragraphs is that?

If that sounds like a dumb thing to ask, please bear with me. I'm hoping that the answer you will give me to the Paragraph Question is somewhere around the 8 to 10 mark. If you wrote many more paragraphs than that, they would be very short and your essay would risk looking rather bitty. If your paragraph count is much lower than that, then your paragraphs are going to be too long and your essay will not be an easy read. Either way, it will seem as though your assignment has not been carefully planned, and as though you are regurgitating all the facts you know without paying attention to structure and flow. Somewhere between eight and ten paragraphs will look good on the page, and (as we will see) will help you to structure your essay. Of course, if you have a bigger word limit then you will be able to use more paragraphs. Think of the right length for a paragraph as being around 150-200 words (for comparison, this paragraph is 177 words long). 

(If you don't know how to answer this question at all, because you never use paragraphs, then you've got a problem. Perhaps what follows will help.)

What is the point of a paragraph? Simply put, a paragraph is a home for an idea. Give each point or section of the argument its own paragraph, and then start a new paragraph for each new idea. Have a look at how the writers you are reading do this. You will find that they take paragraphs seriously (editors and publishers insist that they do). Make sure that you too are following this basic convention of connected prose. Your essay will be much the better for it.

Let's say you've plumped for eight paragraphs. You know your own writing; choose a number that works and feels comfortable for you. You've immediately got a ready-made template for your essay. To see how, list your paragraphs (1, 2, 3...) on a single sheet of paper, spreading out so that you use the whole page. Now, what's Paragraph 1 going to be? That's easy: the introduction. And Paragraph 8 is (just as easy) the conclusion. We'll be talking about both of these essential parts of an essay in later posts.

Two down, six to go. Here's where you really start making decisions about what will go in your essay. There are no right and wrong answers here: the structure depends on the question. But one general question you can ask is: Am I going to come down supporting one theory or another at the end of all this? Do I think that, on balance, the evidence supports one side of an argument over another? If so, deal with your favoured position towards the end. Spend your first couple of paragraphs setting up the 'weaker' argument, and then show why it is the weaker in the remainder of the essay. (This is a standard trick of rhetoric: set up the position you oppose and treat it fairly, and then demolish it by the force of your argument. Save the knock-out blows to the end.)

Let's go back to Theory X. Let's say I know that Theory X was proposed in the 1980s on the basis of some very strong evidential support. But things have changed since then. There have been new findings, methodologies and technologies which support another theory, Theory Y. Meanwhile, over on the West Coast, a small but vocal group are plugging Theory Z. The jury is still out, but from your reading Theory Y fits the evidence best.

So here's a suggestion. Dedicate Paragraph 2 to Theory X. You'll use this space to show why the theory was important and valuable (particularly in historical context, when nobody had yet come up with any decent explanation for Phenomenon A), and to explain its theoretical details. In Paragraph 3, you can show how well it accounts for the evidence, both then and now.

Start Paragraph 4 by showing how Theory X was eventually found lacking, and how Theory Y grew up to challenge it. Give us the theoretical details on Theory Y. Then use Paragraph 5 to show how Theory Y accounts for the evidence, both that which Theory X could and couldn't handle, and also the new findings that have emerged since then.

Paragraph 6 could have a flavour of 'compare and contrast'. Put the two theories side by side and show how they match up. Bring Theory Z in as well for a further comparison. If you have a strong view of your own, then make your case (on the basis of the evidence you have discussed, not on the basis of hunches or personal opinions). If you think that all the theories are as bad as each other, treat them fairly while making it clear what the problems are in each case.

You might want to leave Paragraph 7 aside for loose ends. There are no debates (in psychology, the social sciences, and many other disciplines) that are completely sewn up. There is always scope for more research, and your essay needs to look to the future like this. There is always dissent, and contradictory or equivocal evidence. This penultimate paragraph can be set aside for discussing those issues that are to be continued and resolved (hopefully) in the future. You must be able to show that you know what the limitations are to our current understanding of the phenomenon, and that you understand your science's future priorities for it.

You now have a pretty good plan for what your argument will look like. What you've come up with should look very much like the kind of essay plan you will write in an exam, and that's no coincidence: we're talking about the same thing. Do exactly the same in planning an exam answer, and you'll be on firm ground.