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Don’t use ‘scare quotes’

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment
Closeup of a plaque on a park bench which reads In loving memory of Jen and Ted South. Two of life's "nice" people
From https://old.reddit.com/r/suspiciousquotes/comments/cyqi4b/a_loving_tribute/

If you are quoting someone else in your essay you must enclose the quotation in quotation marks (although it’s often much better to remove the quotation and express the idea in your own words). And in my opinion that is the only proper use of quotation marks in essays.

Sometimes people put quotation marks around a word or a phrase to distance themselves from it, e.g.:

Michael Moore, the so-called “journalist”…

This implies that some people call Moore a journalist, but the writer wants the reader to know that she wouldn’t call him a journalist herself. It’s a rather snide construction and in my opinion it has no place in academic writing. If you don’t agree with a phrase either don’t use it at all, or state your opinion clearly and justify it. e.g.:

In my opinion, Michael Moore’s work does not match the definition of journalism because ….

Or if your tutor doesn’t allow first-person writing:

Michael Moore’s work does not match the definition of journalism because ….

Another way people sometimes use quotation marks is for emphasis. Sometimes a pub will advertise something like:

Traditional Sunday roast “beef” lunch served here

Which always makes me think they’re using scare quotes and they’re trying to say:

Some people might call it “beef”, but I wouldn’t call it that myself.

Language is always changing and although using quotation marks for emphasis is considered incorrect now, it may become normal and acceptable in future. But you just don’t need to use typography to emphasise anything in academic writing. Don’t use bold or italics or underlining or all capitals and certainly don’t use quotation marks for emphasis.

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Should you include your opinions in an essay?

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment
A heavily graffitied wall. A partly-torn sticker in the centre of the image contains a speech bubble and the words "BLAW BLAW BLAW"
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

In general, you are expected to answer essay questions using the information in the module material, explained in your own words. You are not expected to include your own thoughts and opinions about the topics. For example, this would be inappropriate in an essay:

“I think that criminals should be dealt with severely. What gives them the right to break the rules that everyone else has to follow? If I work hard and buy nice things with the money I’ve earned, I shouldn’t have to worry about some juvenile delinquent robbing my house and getting away with a slapped wrist, community service or something like that. If it was up to me, I’d bring back flogging….”

It would be just as inappropriate to express your opinion that criminals are victims of a broken society and should be treated with compassion. You’re not supposed to include your opinions in essays, regardless of whether you suspect your tutor shares those opinions. But that doesn’t mean that you have to just parrot what it says in the module. You are supposed to read the module materials critically. That means you don’t just believe anything you read, but always ask questions about it e.g. “Does that sound convincing to me? What is the evidence to support this? Are these arguments logically watertight? What biases and assumptions might be influencing these ideas”? So for example, this would be appropriate:

“In the textbook it says that people have a right to rise up when their leaders are behaving unjustly. In a democracy, power comes from the people, so what the people do must be democratic. But I don’t agree with that. I agree with Edmund Burke who thought that social order was precious and took ages to build, and it’s really dangerous if a criminal mob can just tear down thousands of years of progress“.

That’s based on the ideas in the book, but the student doesn’t just believe what they’re told: they’ve noticed that two opposing views of the same topic are presented in the book, they’ve thought about both of them, and they’ve decided which one they find more persuasive, and why. It could be made even better by being written in a more academic form, with just a few changes:

“The radical view of rioting argues that people have a right to rise up when their leaders are behaving unjustly (Andrews, 2022 p.331). In a democracy, power comes from the people, so what the people do must be democratic. This contrasts with the conservative view of rioting that social order is precious and takes many generations to build, and it’s dangerous if a criminal mob can just tear down thousands of years of progress (Burke 2003 cited in Andews 2022, p. 334)“.

The student hasn’t said which of these views they agree with, but there’s a hint that they might agree with the view they put second. The rest of the essay, especially the conclusion, should make it clear.

References

Andrews, G. (2022) ‘Riots and disorder on the street’, in Clarke, J., Doye, Z., Hassan, I. and Woodward, K. (eds) Understanding social lives, part 2. Milton Keynes: The Open University, pp. 313–354.

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Active reading for social scientists

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment
A young women wearing a black hat sits crosslegged on a leather sofa reading a book.
Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

Guest blog by Dr Alan Sennett, Open University arts and social science tutor.

How many of us have had the experience of reading module materials without really taking anything in?  After a while you become conscious that you are just sitting there staring blankly at the text.  Nothing is sticking.  Or perhaps you are taking notes from the materials but realise you are just rewriting them.  But to what purpose?  You may end up with pages of detailed notes but only a vague notion of their significance for your studies.  Or maybe your study technique is to use coloured highlighters.  You find that you are marking almost everything as relevant.  The short explanation for this is that you have not planned how you are going to read.  You do not have a strategy for actively reading and critically processing text.

Active reading

It is evident that reading for academic purposes is quite different from reading for enjoyment where there are no stakes.  Students need to understand, extract, and evaluate information and arguments for quite specific purposes.  At some point we are going to use some of this material in written assignments.  To read efficiently and effectively, we must first have some sense of what we want to get out of the text.  We must also have techniques for engaging critically with the materials.  Here is one tried and tested method you might find helpful.

When faced with new materials to comprehend, one active reading method is the following:

  1. Skim read the text to get a general sense of the nature of the material.  Possibly read the introduction and conclusion and skim through the unit, chapter, article, or webpage.  But don’t take notes yet.
  2. If you are reading towards an assignment, ask in what ways this text might help.  This means already having a sense of what the assignment is asking you to do. There may be guidance notes. Use them.  Sketch out some questions to ask of the text that relate directly to the one you have been asked.
  3. Now read the text in a more intensive way.  Perhaps in bursts of 15 minutes (set a timer and take breaks).  Don’t take detailed notes yet but you might annotate the text.  I use pencil to make marginal notes on key thinkers, concepts, and theories that relate to the question.  Also mark out some key sections that may be crucial.
  4. Now close the text and write down what you recall, especially the aspects that relate to your purpose (the assignment question).  One variation here is to do this after each 15-minute burst.
  5. Finally, review the text in more detail.  You will probably now see what is most relevant for your purposes.  You may not need to read it all now, just sections.  But what you do read will mean more to you and you can now take more effective notes.  Aim for brevity in note-taking.

After working on ways to read more actively and, hence, effectively, you might want to reflect upon how you can engage more critically with the texts.  The following resources include thoughts on both active and critical reading that you may find helpful.

Some online resources

Critical reading techniques: Active reading | Help Centre | The Open University

https://mcgraw.princeton.edu/undergraduates/resources/resource-library/active-reading-strategies

What Is Critical Reading? A Definition For Learning

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe-writing-centre/critical-reading-and-writing

Don’t start sentences with an “-ing” word

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment
A blue plate, smashed to fragments
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Sentence fragments are incomplete sentences, like these:

  • And a cup of coffee.
  • A long time ago.
  • Showing that teenagers have undeveloped prefrontal cortexes.

You can make these into complete sentences by adding in the missing part:

  • I’d like an all-day breakfast, please, and a cup of coffee.
  • A long time ago, there was an old woodcutter.
  • Jay Giedd conducted a study showing that teenagers have undeveloped prefrontal cortexes.

The last example is a very common type of sentence fragment seen in essays. Starting a complete grammatical sentence with an -ing word is possible, but it’s more often a red flag that a sentence fragment is coming. If you find yourself starting a sentence with an “-ing” word, ask yourself whether it’s a sentence fragment, and how to turn it into a complete sentence.

There’s a more detailed explanation of what makes something a complete grammatical sentence, what makes a sentence fragment, and how to fix them here: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/sentence-fragment/

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The Open University is a proper noun

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment
A modern-looking university building made of concrete, plate glass, and brick
Robert Hooke building at Open University Campus in Milton Keynes by Chmee2 licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

The Open University is a proper noun. “Proper” in this sense is like “property” – it means “belonging to someone or something”. A proper noun is the official name of someone or something.

Proper nouns should almost always be capitalised. It would be wrong to write the open university, if you meant the British university based in Milton Keynes.

People’s names are proper nouns. You should write:

  • Melanie Rimmer, not melanie rimmer
  • Donald Duck, not donald duck
  • Jean Piaget, not jean piaget

And so on.

Place names are also proper nouns:

  • Milton Keynes, not milton keynes
  • City Road, not city road (if you mean the road in Cardiff called City Road)

Business names are also proper nouns:

  • The Macintosh Centre, not the macintosh centre
  • Taste Buds Café, not taste buds café

There are a few exceptions; for example the feminist bell hooks chose to write her name in lower case to honour her grandmother. The business eBay starts with a lower case letter. But the general rule is always capitalise proper nouns.

Quick answers: what’s the difference between a Bibliography and a References section?

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment

A Bibliography is a list of all the sources you read whilst preparing a piece of writing.

A References section is a list of all the sources you referred to in a piece of writing.

So if you read it but didn’t cite it, it would belong in a Bibliography but it wouldn’t belong in a References section.

Are you supposed to include a Bibliography? Or are you supposed to include a References section? Check your Assignment Guide to make sure.

Throat-clearing sentences

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment
Close-up of six brightly coloured sweets. Could be cough sweets.
[108/365] by Pimthida under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“Many researchers have investigated the topic of childhood resilience over the years”

This is what’s known as a throat-clearing sentence. It’s true, but it’s so vague and general to not be worth saying. Other examples would be:

“There are many factors that influence the development of childhood resilience”

“Childhood resilience is an important and interesting topic”

“For hundreds of years, people have wondered what influences the development of childhood resilience”

They’re called throat-clearing sentences because they’re like the noise of clearing your throat before you make a speech – they’re just meaningless sounds you make before your actual speech, or essay, gets underway. It’s OK to write them. Maybe that’s how you clear your brain before you can start writing meaningful things. But you should delete them during the editing stage, along with any other sentences that don’t say anything worth saying.

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How to define a term

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment
A photograph of a page of a dictionary, defining the term "embargo"
Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

There are two approaches to defining terms in your essays:

  1. give someone else’s definition, e.g. “Erving Goffman defined stigma as an ‘attribute that is deeply discrediting’ (1963, p. 3).”
  2. give your own definition.

You are allowed to give your own definitions because you are using the word in your essay and presumably you are using it to mean something. So you can explain (define) what you are using the word to mean. E.g. “In the image, the children are finger painting in a playful way. I am using the word playful to mean they seem to be finger painting voluntarily and are finding it fun. Playful activities are different from work activities, by which I mean activities children do because they are required to do it, and they would not do if they had a choice. Both playful and work activities can result in learning. Jean Piaget said that ‘play is the work of childhood’ (Piaget, 1951)”

Option 2 is especially useful if your module doesn’t seem to have a definition of a particular term you want to use. I well remember being very frustrated as an undergraduate that my lecturers insisted I define every term I used, but the learning materials they gave me often didn’t do that. I wish someone had told me I was allowed to define the terms myself. That doesn’t mean you can be silly – don’t write “In this essay I will use the term ‘habitus’ to mean a small lizard of the genus Lygodactylus capensis”. Read option 2 again – when you use a word, you are using it to mean something. So simply explain how you are using the word in your essay.

If your module does define the term you should refer to that definition, even if you are going to use a different definition in your essay e.g. you might write “The E219 Glossary (The Open University, 2022) defines conditioning as ‘A model of learning concerned with the formation of associations’. In this essay I will use the term to mean learning processes that happen without the conscious will of the learner, through the unconscious formation of associations between stimuli and behaviours”. That is a slightly more specific definition than the one given in the module glossary, and defining it in this way shows you have a a good understanding of the concept. Demonstrating your understanding in this way will probably earn you a higher grade (as long as it’s relevant to the essay question).

References

Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Piaget, J. (1951) Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood. Translated by C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson. New York: Norton and Co (this edition 1962).

The Open University (2022) E219 Glossary. Available at https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/glossary/view.php?id=1972028 Accessed 28/1/2023

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How to succinctly describe a study in your own words

Melanie RimmerLeave a comment

People exploring a maze
Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

You need to tell the reader 3 things, with 2 other optional things:

  1. (Optional) Why did the researchers do the study?
  2. What did they do?
  3. What did they find?
  4. What does it mean?
  5. (Optional) How does it relate to the essay question?

Examples:

“DeNora and Belcher (2020) were interested in the effect of music in clothes shops [why they did the study]. They recruited people to wear concealed recording devices when they went clothes shopping, and talk out loud about what they were doing and how they felt [what they did]. They found that different shops played different music that appealed to different categories of consumers, and that the music did have an effect on how the shoppers felt [what they found].”

“The Department for Education collected data about 18 year old school leaver in England and what happened to them next [what they did]. Children who had been entitled to free school meals because their family’s income was low were less likely to go on to higher education (46% compared to 51%) and more likely to go into further education (10% compared to 7%) [what they found]. This suggests that income inequality in childhood has long term effects on a young person’s life chances by influencing their educational opportunities [what it means and how it relates to the essay question].”

“Carraher et al. (1985) asked young people in Brazil to do maths problems on the streets where they made their living by selling things, and they also asked them to do maths problems in a school-like setting [what they did]. The young people got almost all of the maths problems right in the streets, but got most of them wrong in the school setting [what they found]. Carraher et al. suggested that the difference was that the children used different symbolic systems in the two different settings, and that the symbolic system used makes a big difference to getting the right answers [what it means].”

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References

Carraher, T.N., Carraher, D.W. and Schliemann, A.D., 1985. Mathematics in the streets and in schools. British journal of developmental psychology, 3(1), pp.21-29.

DeNora, T. and Belcher, S., 2000. ‘When you’re trying something on you picture yourself in a place where they are playing this kind of music’–musically sponsored agency in the British clothing retail sector. The Sociological Review, 48(1), pp.80-101.

Department for Education (DfE) (2018) Destinations of Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5 Students, England, 2016-2017. Department for Education [online]. Available at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/748199/Destinations_Main_Text_2017.pdf