Today's session focused mainly on the credibility of sources in writing. My hot tips for extra marks in Writing in the sciences are:
- Know the club. There will always be a group of well established and recognised writers who publish frequently in your topic areas. (If you are writing at postgraduate level, get to know the Gurus so well that you know exactly where the source comes from without even checking!)
- Show breadth of research. Nothing puts a lecturer off more than a superficial reference list.
- Show clusters of agreement (Duff, 2006; Johnston, 2007 and Jones, 2005) and disagreement (Jones, 2005; Johnston, 2007 and Duff in Johnston, 2005 p. 7).
- Try to keep your sources as current as possible - particularly important for writing in the sciences and in engineering where things change so quickly.
We looked at the credibility of sources. Which of these is MOST credible and which of these is LEAST credible to use in an assignment? You can post a comment if you like and I'll post up the answers next week.
(Online version, because the print is pretty small)
This week's resources are:
We didn't get through everything this week, so next week we will do some more in this area (specifically using sources to report ideas and paraphrasing).
Have a great weekend.
3 comments:
I think in terms of plagiarism and essay writing, it would be hard to be creative when you are meant to have specifics.
That might suggest they have to be extra diligent to their work, would that be fair to assume?
Would someone like to have a go at responding to Amy, before I post my views on this? What is the role of creativity in scientific writing? What does it mean to be scientific and does it assume extra dilligence? If so, how?
Hi Amy
How time gets away! In the absence of other responses, let me do the honours.
I prefer to steer away from notions of not being creative when writing essays. We are supposed to be scholarly in the way we present information. That is, we should support our views with academic sources. However, we ARE allowed to have our views.
A brief example of the way this occurs is where we might state our position in the topic sentence. This position is formed by our own understanding and views; the lectures we attend and the preliminary reading. You can think of the topic sentence as your own idea/view/position (in this case) For example:
Concept mapping helps students to organise ideas when writing an essay
We then need to support this with evidence (this is part of the scholarly approach)
Concept mapping helps students to organise ideas when writing an essay. A study (Carter, 2007) of science students using concept mapping in their writing indicated much stronger structure and cohesion, when compared to humanities students who generally do not use concept mapping.
You can then add your own interpretation or orientation with:
This means...
However...[another study found]
Despite this...
Yes, diligence is very important - especially when applying referencing technique. However, nobody ever said essay (scientific or otherwise) writers can't be creative. It just happens in a different way to, say, writing fiction or a blog.
This is a nice resource for looking at the difference between reflective (first person), essay and report writing:
http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/Resources/la/QuickClicks%20Repository/LC_worksheet_subj-obj%20scale.pdf
Does anyone have another view about this? Or a resource?
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