Here’s another announcement I’m happy to make: our pre-honours workshops have been finalised and we are now accepting bookings. These workshops will involve large groups but we’ll keep things interactive through the use of live electronic polling. You’ll look closely at excerpts from real student essays to see which approaches work and which do not.
Visit our workshop page now to see what’s on offer. Don’t wait to book.
The PPLS Writing Centre is happy to announce that students are now allotted two appointments per calendar month, effective immediately.
Previously, we allowed two appointments per semester. This has been changed so that students don’t feel the need to save up their hours.
There will be an announcement concerning workshops within the next day or two. These are due to be held on the week of October 22nd.
Students often try to give their writing an academic air by making it more difficult to read. They’ll turn a straightforward sentence like “the puppet popped out and scared the children” into “the puppet’s sudden emergence caused fear in the children”. Or write sentences like “an experiment to test this theory was carried out”, in which all instances of “I” or “we” are scrubbed out in an effort to make things less personal.
But fewer professional researchers feel this shyness about being direct and personal in their writing. To illustrate this, I’ve taken extracts written by PPLS researchers and degraded them into the sort of writing that’s more typical of undergraduates. Take a look at the transformed sentences below and consider how they could be made less obscure.
Animals setting off to their usual foraging grounds can be seen to be in possession of knowledge of their destination based on the fact that different starting places and different routes exist.
An experiment in which eight- to ten-year-old children played a tangram description and matching task with a partner, as in Wilkes-Gibbs and Clark (1992), was carried out to distinguish these alternatives.
You shouldn’t see the writing centre as remedial. Even the strongest writer in this room can benefit from listening to what someone else has to say about their essay. As proof, consider the academics in our department. Even those who have been publishing for decades are glad to get outside opinions. Nearly every journal article they write includes a long list of people who helped make the writing better.Continue reading “Words to use carefully”
At the PPLS Writing Centre, we concentrate on improving your ability to write clearly and put forward coherent arguments. We try to avoid getting into proofreading or giving advice on your essay’s content. After all, we don’t want to duplicate the help that is available from elsewhere within the University of Edinburgh. I have already written a blog post about some of the options that are available (eligibility varies).
It was a nice surprise today to see an announcement that EUSA’s peer proofreading service, which normally closes over the summer, has been made available until August 10th. Eligibility is limited to current MSc students who are non-native speakers of English. You are welcome to access this help in addition to any appointments you book with us.
It can be a bit scary to be told to “engage” with your sources. After all, who are you to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? The research you’ve been looking at was carried out by people who have spent years in the field, and you’re just beginning your academic career. Continue reading ““Engaging” with your sources”
The University of Edinburgh has a staff and student subscription to Lynda.com, a site with many video courses on how to use software more effectively and acquire new skills. It’s well worth linking your EASE account and having a look around.
With dissertation deadlines drawing closer, there are many MSc students who are approaching software like RStudio or SPSS for the first time. For these students, the following courses might be of interest. They cover program installation, data entry and manipulation, basic statistical analysis and chart production. Continue reading “Learning RStudio and SPSS”
See “Workshops” for details of what will be held when. Please make sure to book immediately, as there are only so many places available. Register yourself even if places run out, as you will be added to a waiting list.
During your studies, you will be probably be told at least once that you should pay attention to topic sentences. These sentences come at the beginnings of paragraphs and introduce the central ideas that are about to be developed. “Use topic sentences,” the advice-givers say, “and your writing will become clear”.
And yet many examples of fine writing do not use topic sentences. I’ve read many paragraphs where the first sentence does not point towards the incoming payload at all, and yet the authors of these paragraphs are praised for their style and clarity. Then why should we use them? Are topic sentences another example of a fictional device made up to turn writing into a paint-by-numbers exercise? Continue reading “Topic sentences and how to use them”
It’s important to be able to write a good abstract. How else are you going to convince people to accept your journal articles or conference presentations?
Abstracts share a lot with introductions. In both you’ll have to provide context, establish a problem or niche, and then fill in the knowledge gap with your own position. And they both function to get the reader interested in finding out what you have to say.
But you’ll have to go a step further with abstracts. Continue reading “Model abstracts in linguistics”
