I don’t have that information, but you do. The results date should be there on your module information. Hopefully, you can find it now you know where to look.
Quick answers: When will I get my module results?
How to handle references with identical citations
and disability: a critique of critical disability studies, Disability & Society, 29:4, 638-650, DOI:
10.1080/09687599.2013.831751
A Convention for Disambiguating Citations
In this essay I am going to refer to several sources which all have the same author (Melanie Rimmer) and year (2021) and therefore all have the same citation. The first source I will cite is a journal article. Melanie Rimmer did not in fact publish any journal articles in 2021 so this is a fictional article for the purpose of this essay, which itself is a fictional essay for the purpose of a blog post. Because this is the first source by Rimmer in 2021 mentioned in this article, I will add a letter “a” to the end of the citation to distinguish it from the other sources with the same citation, like this (Rimmer, 2021a). If I refer to the same journal article again later in the essay, it will still be referred to as (Rimmer, 2021a). I don’t just increment the letter each time I include any citation by Rimmer in 2021. The citation (Rimmer, 2021a) will always refer to the same journal article in this essay1.
The second source by Rimmer mentioned in this essay is a book she wrote. This also is fictional. It’s my essay so if I want to pretend I published in Nature, gave my inaugural speech as president of the US, and was nominated Time magazine’s person of the year, I will. In any case, because it is the second source mentioned in this essay, I will give it the letter “b” i.e. (Rimmer, 2021b). Any additional sources by Rimmer in 2021 will have letters appended to them in the order they are first mentioned in the essay.
When I write my References list, I will add the letters a, b, c etc. to the references which match the citations in the essay. By doing this, there is no ambiguity about which citation matches to which reference, even though several of the sources have the same author and year. Without the disambiguating letters, it would be impossible to know which source is being referred to.
In conclusion, the convention of adding disambiguating letters to citations which share the same author and year helps avoid confusion. In this essay I have explained how you can use it in your own essays.
1If I later write a completely different essay which also refers to several different sources by Melanie Rimmer in 2021, the journal article might be mentioned second or third etc, in which case it would have the letter “b” or “c” in that article. In this current essay, though, the journal article was mentioned first so it always has the letter “a” appended.
(434 words)
References
Rimmer, M., 2021a. “Please clap”: Challenging Cultural Epistemology in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. British Journal of Social Psychology, 60(2), pp.610-634.
Rimmer, M., 2021b. Prefacing Philosophical Feminism in Minecraft. SAGE Publications Limited.
Elementary, my dear Watson
Some student essays are made up of a series of detailed descriptions of relevant ideas and evidence from the module, but they don’t explain what it all means or how it relates to the essay question. They remind me of Sherlock Holmes stories in which Holmes points out several pieces of evidence e.g. the butler had orange mud on his left heel, the body of the dead wife had a tear on the collar of her dress, and it was snowing in Edinburgh on Thursday. But although it all seems very obvious to Holmes what this means, Dr Watson (and we, the readers) are still clueless about who the killer was. We need Holmes to do more than just present the evidence: we need him to explain what each piece of evidence means, and why it proves that the disgraced younger brother was the murderer.
You have to do the same. You may have correctly identified and described relevant evidence, but you also need to give an explanation of what each piece of evidence it means, and why it solves The Puzzling Case Of [Insert Essay Question Here].
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Tease Apart a Quotation Free Download
There’s really only two occasions when it’s OK to include a quotation in an essay. The first is if you are quoting someone famous saying something in a famous way. You wouldn’t paraphrase Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream…” speech, or a line of Amanda Gorman’s poetry; you’d quote it directly. The other occasion is when you are quoting an extract of qualitative data; something said by a participant or one of the people the research is about. If you are describing research about people with disabilities, people who have experienced trauma, members of the Roma community, etc, you shouldn’t put words in their mouth but let them speak in their own words.
For everything else, you should paraphrase. Explain the ideas of textbook authors, journal article authors etc. in your words. Paraphrasing, rather than quoting, demonstrates that you understand what they meant. You should also explain why you chose these ideas to answer the question, rather than simply quoting and leaving the reader to guess why you chose that quotation.
I’ve attached a downloadable worksheet which guides you through the process of teasing apart a quotation to help you paraphrase it rather than quote it. I’ve adapted the worksheet with permission from an activity by Natalie Lancer of unicoach.org I highly recommend Natalie’s workshops for academic writing.
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Proofreading 3 ways
It’s important to proof-read your assignments before you submit them. Here’s 3 ways to do it:
1. Ask someone else
They don’t have to know anything about the field. In a way, it’s better if they don’t. They’re not checking whether you’ve answered the question right, they’re just checking that what you have written makes sense. Ask them to look for any spelling or grammatical errors and anything they just can’t understand. If you have used jargon words they don’t know you should define those in your essay. Make sure you thank them – they’ve done you a valuable favour.
2. Do it yourself
It’s hard to proof-read your own work. If you just read it “in your head” as usual you’ll tend to see what you meant to write, or what you thought you wrote, instead of what you actually wrote. What I do to get round this is to read like a little child – I literally run my finger along each word and read out loud. This forces you to read what’s actually there.
3. Get your device to do it
In Microsoft Word, select the “Review” menu and then “Read Aloud”. It will read your document aloud to you. Other versions of Word and other word processors have different ways of doing this: you can Google to find out how to do it in your software. There are also websites where you can copy-and-paste your text and they will read it aloud for you, e.g. this one https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/. Just like Option 2, your device will read what you actually wrote instead of what you meant to write, so any errors should jump out at you.
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Footnote. Muphry’s law states: “If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”
Dealing with unfamiliar words
Welcome to E232, Exploring Childhood and Youth
Choose Your Own (Study) Adventure
I like playing video games, so video game metaphors make sense to me. In video games you can often choose your difficulty setting. You can choose Easy Mode in which all of the monsters and puzzles are easy to beat, you start out with more health, and your ammo lasts longer. But in Easy Mode the rewards are small. In Normal Mode the monsters and puzzles are normal difficulty and the rewards are a bit higher than Easy Mode. In Hard Mode the monsters are really hard to kill and the puzzles are hard to solve. You don’t have much health or armour in Hard Mode so you die a lot. But the rewards for this mode are the best.
What on earth are you going on about, Melanie? What do videogames have to do with studying for a degree?
You can choose your difficulty setting in your studies as well. In Hard Mode studying you try to read every single page of the textbook and make detailed, colour-coded notes. You do every single online activity. You try to write every assignment to the best of your possible ability. It takes a long time to study on Hard Mode. But if you have that time available, you can earn the best rewards – you’ll get the best possible grades at the end of the module.
In Normal Mode studying you read as much as you can but you don’t always get around to reading every single thing. Sometimes you skim-read sections and don’t make notes except perhaps highlighting or underlining some sentences on a page. You skip the online activities when you don’t have the time. And you have a good try at the assignments but sometimes you rush them a bit. You’ll comfortably pass the module on Normal Mode (probably – it depends on you and on the module), but you won’t get the best possible grade.
Studying on Easy Mode you do the minimum you can get away with whilst still doing enough to pass the course. You only read the bits of the module that are essential to write the assignments. You don’t read them in detail with the goal of understanding; you just skim them, looking for things to put in your assignments. And you work on the assignments until you’re pretty sure you’ve done enough to pass and then you submit them. The maximum reward you hope for on Easy Mode is to barely pass.
All of this is to say – you don’t have to study on Hard Mode. Your family, your job, and your own physical and mental health are all more important than your studies. I’m writing this in the midst of the COVID pandemic, which has made everything so much harder that we all have to make compromises and get our priorities very clear. So it’s OK sometimes to decide to shift your effort down to Normal Mode or even Easy Mode. You can always step up the difficulty again later if things get better (they WILL get better by the way. I don’t know when, but they will).
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Essay Planning Workbook Free Download
I have created an essay planning workbook which you can download for free. It takes you step-by-step through the stages of essay planning. Please feel free to use this workbook and distribute it. It is licensed by me under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) which means you are free to share, copy, redistribute, and adapt it (under the same creative commons license) as long as you give me credit for creating it.
I’d love to hear from people who have used it, so leave a comment or email me.
Melanie Rimmer 