Study skills and advice from an experienced Open University lecturer on modules DD102 (Introducing the social sciences), D120 (Encountering psychology in context), E232 (Exploring childhood and youth), E225 (Child Development). Most content also useful for students at other universities, especially social sciences.
My sister tells stories like this: I’ll ask her “Why is your leg in a cast? How did you break it?” and she’ll say “Well, I was in Asda and I needed some bread. But they didn’t have the bread I usually get, Hovis Tasty Wholemeal, so I got some Allinson’s granary bread instead. And then I remembered my husband doesn’t like granary bread because the bits get stuck in his fillings….”. The story goes on for hours and eventually I find out she was rear-ended by a bin wagon driving back home, and all the information about Asda and bread and my brother-in-law’s fillings was completely irrelevant to why her leg is in a cast. Drives me mad. I love her, though.
When you are writing essays, only include the information you need to answer the question. Just because the question was about attachment, that doesn’t mean it’s always appropriate to describe Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Test protocol in great detail. Not every question about Piaget requires you to list all his developmental stages. Ask yourself “Would my essay make just as much sense if I left this part out? Would it still answer the question?”
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.
You need to tell the reader 3 things, with 2 other optional things:
(Optional) Why did the researchers do the study?
What did they do?
What did they find?
What does it mean?
(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].”
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.
When you are writing an essay that compares two different ideas/points of views, and then concludes which one is more persuasive (as you would in an “evaluate” essay), you usually put the idea you disagree with first. Give it a fair hearing and make sure you do mention everything that is good and persuasive about this idea.
After that, give the idea you agree with and explain why it is right and the other idea is wrong. It’s just because you can’t explain why an idea is wrong if you haven’t said what the idea is yet, so it works much better that way round.
Reusing key words and phrases from the question helps keep your answer on the topic. Good places to do this include the first and last sentences of each paragraph. E.g. if the question was “Evaluate Piaget’s claim that children in the pre-operational stage of development are unable to decentre from their own perspective”, the first sentences of some of your paragraphs might be:
“One study which supports Piaget’s claim is….”
“Another piece of evidence in support of the claim is….”
“On the other hand, Hughes’ (1985) study calls into doubt Piaget’s claim….”
“Another study which seems to show that children in the pre-operational stage of development can decentre from their own perspective is …..”
And they might have last sentences such as:
“This study seems to show that children in the pre-operational stage of development are unable to decentre from their own perspective, which supports Piaget’s claim”
“This shows that, in contrast to Piaget’s claim, some children in the pre-operational stage of development are able to decentre from their own perspective”
Don’t worry about sounding repetitive. There are no marks for style in these essays, but there are marks for sticking to the question and answering it.
Two other places where you absolutely should include the wording of the question are in the introduction and conclusion paragraphs. In the introduction, you can always go with the slightly clunky but perfectly serviceable:
“In this essay, I will evaluate Piaget’s claim that children in the pre-operational stage of development are unable to decentre from their own perspective”
If your tutor doesn’t like first-person language, use “This essay will evaluate Piaget’s claim….”. But it’s often possible to do it more elegantly, e.g:
“Piaget claimed that children in the pre-operational stage of development are unable to decentre from their own perspective (insert citation). This essay will evaluate that claim”
Or even more boldly
“This essay will show that Piaget was wrong to claim that children in the pre-operational stage of development are unable to decentre from their own perspective”
You’ll also have to define the key terms in your introduction paragraph.
The first sentence of your conclusion paragraph should always be your answer to the question e.g.:
“In conclusion, Piaget’s claim that children in the pre-operational stage of development are unable to decentre from their own perspective is not supported by more recent evidence”.
And then summarise the evidence you’ve presented that contradicts the claim.
Business Card With Meerschaum, Tobacco Jar & Deerstalker by Still The Oldie on Flickr
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].
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.
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
Screengrab by Melanie Rimmer, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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.
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.”
It’s normal to find writing in your own words hard at first. One thing that makes it much harder is when you read one sentence from the textbook, and then try to put that sentence in your own words, and then you read another sentence from the textbook and try to put that into your own words. It’s almost impossible to do that without just paraphrasing, which is a form of plagiarism. What you should do instead is to read a whole paragraph or section of the textbook and then close the textbook and try to explain the key ideas from that section in your own words. When I say “in your own words” I mean in the way you normally talk. You could use a voice recorder app on your phone to record yourself while you explain in words what you just read. Don’t try to sound “academic”, just use your normal way of talking as though you were describing something to a friend. It might sound something like this:
“Ummm, so there was this guy Booth and he did some research in London and he went round people’s houses in every street and made notes about who was living there and their ages and occupations. And he also made some notes about their ummmm I guess, like, their social class or status. And they seemed sort of judgmental calling people some people dirty and vicious and other people he called respectable. And he coloured in a map with different colours for the different social classes so you can see where the rich people lived and where the poor people lived. It’s important because, erm, because he was sort of inventing social science, how to do social science”
Then you can write that up into notes, tidying it up a little bit (removing the umms and errs for example) and maybe looking up the odd important detail, such as Booth’s first name and the date:
“Charles Booth did some research in London between 1886 and 1903. He went round people’s houses in every street and made notes about who was living there and their ages and occupations. He also made notes about their social class or status. These notes were sometimes judgmental, for example he called some people dirty and vicious, and other people he described as respectable. Booth used these notes to make a map with different colours for the different social classes. The map made it so you can see where the rich people lived and where the poor people lived. Booth’s work was important because he was inventing how to do social science. (Book 1, Chapter 1, pages 9-11)”
Now those are your notes, written up in your own words. None of these sentences are the same as the sentences in the textbook. It’s all your words.
When it comes to writing an assignment, you should use your notes as the primary resource and only refer to the textbook for references and to pick up additional details. For example if you were answering a question such as “How does social science differ from other ways of investigating social life, for example journalism or art?” and you wanted to write a paragraph about Booth you might write something like:
“One way that social science differs from other ways of investigating social life is that it attempts to be systematic. For example, one of the first systematic studies of social life in London was a survey done by Charles Booth between 1886 and 1903 (Blakeley and Staples, 2014). By visiting the houses in every street and making notes about who was living there and their social status, Booth produced a colour coded map of the city which showed where the rich people lived and where the poor people lived. This differs from a journalist or an artist because they might only talk to a few people and ask them different questions each time. But Booth visited every house and collected data about the same things in each one i.e. he was systematic. In some ways though Booth’s research was more like journalism or art because he also made moral judgements about people. For example he called some people dirty and vicious, and other people he described as respectable. Modern social scientists are supposed to avoid making moral judgments like this.”
After some practice you’ll be able to skip the voice recording part and write notes in your own words after reading a paragraph or section.
Step by step guide to writing in your own words
DON’T read a sentence from your textbook then try to write that sentence in your own words.
DO read a whole paragraph or section of your textbook at a time
THEN close your textbook and record yourself explaining the main points of that section in your own words
WRITE UP your spoken notes, tidying up the “umms” and “errs” and adding in important details checked from the textbook
BASE YOUR ESSAY mainly on your notes, using your textbook for additional details
Melanie Rimmer 