Download Writing Research TTH workshop first session_June 2012

Presenter: Dr Liz Tynan
JCU Graduate Research School
15 June 2012
“I
do not like to write - I
like to have written.”
American writer Gloria Steinem
“…a
horrible, exhausting
struggle, like a long bout of
some painful illness.”
English writer George Orwell
A
scientist must not just “do” science,
they must “write” science as well.
 Few
other professions require that
every stage of one’s work be so
meticulously documented and argued.
 Bad
writing can slow down
or prevent the publication
of good research.
 Researchers
can gather
excellent data but unless
that data can be turned into
good writing, its importance
can be lost.
…a
naturalist’s life
would be a happy
one if he only had
to observe and
never to write.
Charles Darwin
(Fortunately he did get around to
doing some writing, however)
Definition of scientific publication
 “An
acceptable primary scientific publication
must be the first disclosure containing
sufficient information to enable peers (1) to
assess observations, (2) to repeat experiments,
and (3) to evaluate intellectual processes;
moreover, it must be susceptible to sensory
perception, essentially permanent, available
to the scientific community without
restriction, and available for regular screening
by one or more of the major recognized
secondary services [such as Biological
Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts etc].”
Council of Biology Editors, 1968
 Clarity
relies upon a robust understanding of
the rules and conventions of English expression.
 Clear,
grammatical and well-punctuated
sentences transmit ideas without confusion.
 Every
sentence carries the possibility both of
clear communication & of serious
misunderstanding.
 Clarity
needs strong writing & editing skills.
 Another
consequence of the iron rule of clarity
is that you have to be exactly clear what you
want to say.
 Ensure
this inner understanding by beginning
writing earlier rather than later in the process.
 Clarity
comes from moving words around both
in your head and on the page.
 Question
lazy but pervasive
habits, such as overuse of jargon
and hackneyed expressions.
 Readers
respond to fresh
expression.
 New
ideas demand fresh writing,
and fresh writing aids clarity.

A large mass of literature has accumulated on the
cell walls of staphylococci.

The resulting disease has been described in detail in
salmon.

This book includes discussion of shock and renal
failure in separate chapters.

[Professor Colin Woolf] presented evidence that
women who smoke are likely to have pulmonary
abnormalities and impaired lung function at the
annual meeting of the American Lung Association.
(Examples from Robert A Day, How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, fifth edition, Oryx Press, Westport,
1998, p. 203.)

Detach yourself from your work to empathise
with your readers.

Imagine one individual and write for that
person.

It is your job to make the meaning clear, not
the reader’s job to interpret meaning.

The reader is the most important person in
this communication transaction.

“What is written without effort is in general
read without pleasure.”

Samuel Johnson

A clear summary at the beginning (the abstract)

An introduction and conclusion to match

Clear definitions of terms

Clearly presented evidence and reasoning

Concise writing

Concrete, not abstract, writing

No jargon, circumlocution, tautology or clichés

Good use of English: grammar, spelling,
punctuation and style
It
is the mark of an
educated mind to be
able to entertain a
thought without
accepting it.
Aristotle, Ancient Greek philosopher
 Critical
thinking = critical writing.
 Good
writing is presented in a logical way so
that the reader can follow the arguments
and the reasoning of the writer.
 Good
writing needs good thinking; good
thinking is developed and made explicit
through writing.
An
active, purposeful,
organised cognitive process
we use to carefully examine
our thinking and the
thinking of others, in order
to clarify and improve our
understanding.
John Chaffee, Thinking Critically
 Developing
a logical argument;
 Identifying
the flaws or weaknesses in an
argument;
 Making
relevant connections or links across
disciplines, or from theory to practice;
 Analysing
the material in a range of sources
and synthesising it; and
 Applying
theory to particular cases.
 Expansive
enough to embrace counterarguments.
 Constructed
rationally and
systematically to persuade.
 Contains
specific, well explained and
carefully chosen evidence.
 being
precise, meticulous,
comprehensive and
exhaustive;
 resisting
manipulation and
irrational appeals, and
 avoiding
snap judgments.
 The
claim must be arguable: A disagreement
or a number of legitimate points of view must
exist, or there must be significant gaps in
understanding.
 The
argument must be rational: based in fact
not emotion.
 The
logic must be cohesive: argued in a
linear, step-by-step fashion.
 Credit
must be given where it is due: All
outside sources must be documented.
 An
argument (a conclusion with supporting
premises) may be more readily understood
when placed into a syllogistic framework.
 Syllogisms
can help in understanding
arguments and identifying false arguments.
 They
draw logical links between general
and specific facts about the world to reach
a rational conclusion.
 Premise
1: All plants in which sap
solidifies at the joint between leaf and
stem in autumn are deciduous.
 Premise
2: All oak trees have sap that
solidifies at the joint between leaf and
stem in autumn.
 Conclusion:
deciduous.
Therefore, all oak trees are
 Syllogisms
tend to depend on a universal
statement as the first premise…
 ….then
a specific example as the second
premise
 …with
the conclusion flowing as a logical
consequence from the interaction
between these two elements.
A
good argument has reasons (premises or
evidence) to support its conclusion.
A
clearly written academic paragraph
contains a theme sentence and supporting
evidence.
 So
an academic paragraph is an inversion of
the syllogistic framework, with the
conclusion placed at the beginning.
 Just
because an argument appears to be in
a valid syllogistic form does not mean that
it is a valid argument.
 Using
a syllogistic form, we can see where
the argument has gone wrong:
 Premise:
All birds fly
 Premise:
The emu is a bird
 Conclusion:
Therefore emus fly.
 What
is the main point – the conclusion?
 Where
are the
premises/reasons/evidence to support
that point?
 Show
the reader your reasoning processes by
providing an argument, not just an assertion.
 An
assertion is a truth claim and may be
factual…
 …but
it carries the same weight as an opinion
until it is turned into an argument using
evidence.
Assertion

Between 1945 and 1980, the Australian Senate prevented the Labor
Party from governing effectively by persistently failing to pass
important legislation.
Supported Statement

Between 1945 and 1980, the Australian Senate prevented the Labor
Party from governing effectively by persistently failing to pass
important legislation (Brown, 28; Smith 36-6).
Argument

Between 1945 and 1980, the Australian Senate prevented the Labor
Party from governing effectively by persistently failing to pass
important legislation. For instance, in 1974 the Senate blocked 80
pieces of important legislation (Smith, 23). Brown’s analysis of Senate
voting between 1950 and 1980 showed that the Senate blocked 850
Labor bills but only five of the non-Labor party bills (41).
 Pride
and Prejudice is a great piece of
literature.
 Coral
reefs are valuable ecosystems.
 Business
has a responsibility only to its
shareholders.
 Refuting
involves engaging with the premises
of an argument, not just rejecting it.
 It
means showing the reasons why the
premises are false, or why they cannot
support the conclusion.
 Do
not argue just with the conclusion, but
show how the conclusion is invalid.
 One
problem with academic writing is that
writers do not always state clearly the
inferences in their arguments.
 The
writer may wrongly assume that the
reader will follow the logic.
 Providing
the logical pathway for the reader
is your job.
 Some
arguments are not persuasive because
the full argument is not on the page.

AKA “enthymeme”: a syllogism with an unstated
assumption that must be true for the premises to lead to
the conclusion. For example, Mark Twain said:

“There is no law against composing music when one has
no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is
perfectly legal.”
This witty syllogism has three parts:

There is no law against composing music when one has no
ideas whatsoever. Premise

The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal.
Conclusion

Wagner has no ideas. Implied premise
 Hidden
assumptions are positions held by
the writer that underline and influence
the opinions evident in a piece of writing.
 Lord
Kelvin said: “There is nothing new
to be discovered in physics now. All that
remains is more and more precise
measurement.”
 Consider
some of the hidden assumptions
in Kelvin’s comment.
 That
all the laws of physics are capable of
being finalised/concluded;
 That
by 1900 human knowledge of the laws
of physics had reached this point;
 That
entities smaller than electrons, protons
and neutrons did not exist;
 That
Newtonian physics was the only basis
for all physics understanding;
 That
he (Lord Kelvin) was aware of all
possible physics laws.
 Are
there reasons/facts/evidence to
support each claim?
 Does
the piece of writing depend upon
emotive words or is the language
neutral?

Are the reasons adequate to support the
conclusion?

Are there any hidden assumptions in this
argument?

Are any central words ambiguous or slanted to
incite prejudice?

Are there fallacies in the reasoning?

Is any important information or evidence
omitted?

Is any information false, contradictory, irrelevant
or irreconcilable?
 Good
English usage is essential for good
research writing.
 You
can’t fully control your writing without
understanding the basic logic and technicalities
of language.

Noun

Adjective

Verb

Adverb

Preposition

Pronoun

Conjunction

Interjection

Plus their equivalents: adjectival phrase,
adverbial clause, etc
 Two
“numbers”: singular and plural;
 Five
“cases”: particularly subject
(nominative), object (accusative) and possessive
(genitive);
 Three
 Two
 Five
“persons”: first, second & third;
“voices”: active and passive;
“moods”: indicative (or declarative),
subjunctive (or optative), imperative,
interrogative and infinitive.
 English
verbs have 15 “tenses”.
 The
large number of verbal
tenses ensures that nuanced
action can be reported in
sentences.
 Today
we will only consider the
basics of past, present and
future.
 All
the cases relate to nouns and their
relative position in a sentence.
 When
a noun is in the nominative case it is
the subject of the sentence.
 Placing
the grammatical subject at the
start ensures the most efficient information
delivery system.
 Begin
your sentences with strong key
words and not strings of dead words.
 Pronouns
such as I, we, it, him, her,
their, this and many others are useful
for making the language flow more
smoothly.
 The
noun to which a pronoun refers is
known as its antecedent.

Problems arise when pronouns float around without
an obvious antecedent, which is why it may be
unwise to use them to start a sentence.

Consider this example:

The rise in the dollar has been marked by reduced
exports in the cattle industry. This has worried
some economists.

Does this say that the rise in the dollar or the
reduced exports have worried economists?
 The
finite verb shows whether the action
is taking place in the past, present or
future.
 Sentences
can only be animated by finite
verbs.
 No
English sentence (in three of the four
moods) can properly exist without at least
one noun and one verb in direct
relationship.
 wrote
[past]
 writes
[present]
 will
write [future]
 he
had written [past perfect]
 he
is writing [present continuous]
 he
will be writing [future continuous]
 Changing
tenses randomly is annoying for
the reader and may be confusing.
 Have
a firm of idea of what the dominant
tense in the piece of writing should be.
 Some
academic papers are in the past
tense, some are in the present and some
dabble in the future tense.
 Aim
for consistency.
 The
classical sentence construction is
“subject-verb-object” (SVO). For
example:
 “Annette
writes the paper.”
 The
verb connects the topic of sentence,
Annette, to the thing being acted upon,
the object, also known as the predicate, or
comment, or “accusative case”.
 In
this sentence, the object is “the paper”.
The
SVO sentence is the
essential information
delivery system in English.
The
logical simplicity of
the SVO sentence allows
simple but powerful prose.
 To
be correct, sentences have to be
powered by a finite verb.
 In
our SVO example, the finite verb is
“writes”.
 It
can be changed to indicate past,
present or future tense: wrote,
writes, will write.
A
common error is attempting to use the
word “being” as the driving force of the
sentence.
 This
construction is wrong:
 This
being the ideal environment for coral.
 The
word “being” is not be able to create an
SVO sentence.
 It
can become be grammatical if it is part of
a bigger sentence:
 The
seawater around the reef is pristine,
this being the ideal environment for coral.
 Another
way would be to change the verb
to something suitable. For example:
 This
is the ideal environment for coral.
 Even
better, considering the need to
emphasise the grammatical subject, to
avoid a floating pronoun and to provide the
extra information:
 Coral
grows best in pristine seawater.
 Complex
sentences: a main clause and
attached sub-ordinate clause/s
 Compound
sentences: contains clauses of
equal grammatical status.
 Limit
your sentences to no more than two
or three clauses.
 If
your sentence has six clauses, you will
have to restructure it.
 Subordinate
clauses are joined to the main
clause either by a conjunction or by a semicolon:
 “The
Prime Minister yesterday announced
a sweeping review of the 1992
Broadcasting Act, though it was unlikely to
reform the sector.”
 “The
Prime Minister yesterday announced a
sweeping review of the 1992 Broadcasting
Act and the Communications Minister
established an enquiry into the commercial
radio sector.”
 In
this case both clauses can stand alone
grammatically, once you remove the “and”.
 This
can’t happen with the subordinate clause.

The subject of a sentence must “agree” with the
finite verb of the sentence.

Singular subject = singular verb

Plural subject = plural verb.

The lawyer discusses her strategy.

…and not:

The lawyer discuss her strategy.

Most people with a reasonable grasp of English will
have no problem understanding SV agreement here.
 What
happens when the sentence is less
clear-cut? Consider these sentences:
 The
bittersweet flavour of youth – its trials,
its joys, its adventures, its challenges – are
not soon forgotten.
 OR
 The
bittersweet flavour of youth – its trials,
its joys, its adventures, its challenges – is not
soon forgotten.
 “Annette
writes the paper”: active voice, because
it follows the SVO construction.
 “The
paper is written by Annette”: passive
voice.
 What
was the object now starts the sentence.
 The
former subject (Annette) is now called the
agent – “by Annette”.
 You
must add in a new word to the verb, in this
case “is”, to preserve the original meaning. The
original verb also changes, from writes to written.

Passive voice guarantees a more wordy sentence:
passive verbs are always at least two words.

But you can’t always avoid passive voice.

It may be necessary if the active subject is
unknown or not easily stated:

“Walter’s father was killed in the Second World
War”.

In this case, there can be no “agent” because we
don’t have enough information to be able to say
who carried out the action of the sentence.

Sometimes, even when the “agent” is known, it is not
stated. Passive voice can be used to distance the writer
from the reader and from responsibility for the action in
the sentence. For example:

“The hospital beds have been shut down.”

No agent stated, so no-one has responsibility. Maybe the
sentence could correctly be rendered as:

“The hospital beds have been shut down by the Health
Department.”

…in which case it could be rewritten in active voice as:

“The Health Department shut down the hospital beds.”
 Look
for a compound verb like
“was written” and the word
“by” used to indicate the
passive agent.
 However,
in sentences where
the subject is not known or the
agent is being concealed the
word “by” is not used.

1. Acid etching removed the rust. Active voice acceptable

2. The rust was removed by acid etching.
Passive voice - acceptable

3. Removal of the rust was facilitated by acidetching. Distorted passive - unacceptable

The problem with sentence 3 is that the real
verb that shows the action (remove) is lost in a
weak noun (removal), so another verb must be
supplied.
 Check
for a weak verb such as
facilitated, undertaken etc.
 Find
the hidden verb earlier in the
sentence (in our example it was
“remove” from the noun removal).
 Use
this hidden verb as a direct verb in
the sentence.
Apostrophes are used:
 To
indicate contraction: “It’s [It
is] a pity that people don’t [do
not] care about apostrophes.”
 To
show possession (in nouns,
not pronouns): “The editor’s
lament” for singular; “The
editors’ lament” for plural.
 Apple’s,
pear’s, avocado’s
 Simple
plurals never need an
apostrophe.
 Look
at a word and see whether it is a
contraction or a possessive and then
apply the apostrophe accordingly.
 If
the word is neither of these things, do
not use an apostrophe.

Also common is leaving out apostrophes when they
are clearly needed, such as:
The prawns whiskers
 The projects results
 The managers decisions.

They must be edited to the correct versions:
The prawn’s whiskers/The prawns’ whiskers
 The project’s results/The projects’ results
 The manager’s decisions/The managers’ decisions

 Modern
Australian style dictates that you do
not use an apostrophe in, for example, the
1970s or to show the plural of acronyms such
as QCs or MPs.
 Here,
just a lower case “s” is sufficient and
it keeps it simple and elegant.
 Possessive
pronouns such as its, his, hers,
ours, theirs, yours never have an
apostrophe.
 In
“The cat chased its tail” the possessive
pronoun “its” does not have an apostrophe.
 Consider
whether the word “its” is a
contraction (apostrophe), or whether it is
possessive (no apostrophe).
 Commas
are used to separate
ideas in a sentence and to
otherwise make meaning clear.
 They
provide natural pauses, to
regulate rhythm in ways that
assist meaning.
 The
trend in standard Australian English is to
cut down on commas where possible.
 However,
commas can change the meaning of
a sentence:
 The
politicians, who liked to talk, were
appointed to the committee.
 The
politicians who liked to talk were
appointed to the committee.
To avoid ambiguity:
 “When the father finished washing, the children went to the
beach.”
Between adjectives before a noun:
 A large, black van.
In a list to separate the elements:
 The basic stages of writing an article are: outlining, researching,
drafting, checking and confirming facts, redrafting and editing.
To distinguish parenthetical words and phrases:
 My view, therefore, is that editors should always be consistent.
 Pay
special attention to parenthetical words
and phrases.
 Commas
must always be used in pairs in this
case. You cannot open such a phrase with a
comma and not close it.
 In
“My view, therefore, is that editors
should always be consistent”, not placing the
second comma after “therefore” would be
grammatically incorrect.
 See
if the word or phrase could be
taken out without damaging the
grammatical integrity of the sentence.
 If
it can be taken out, then you must
use two commas around it.
 Do
not let a comma stand between a
grammatical subject and its verb:
 “A
grammatical subject links strongly to
its verb.”
 Do
 “A
not write:
grammatical subject, links strongly to
its verb.”

The complication arises when you are inserting a
descriptive phrase:

“The woman, who was increasingly impatient,
waited in line.”

The grammatical subject, “the woman” does have
a comma after it.

The commas enclose a parenthetical phrase that
could be taken out without disrupting the
grammar.
Similarly,
 On the other hand,
 In conclusion,
 Therefore,
 In fact,
 That is,
 More importantly,
 Namely,
 Of course,
 Furthermore,
 Put simply,


The semi-colon substitutes for a
conjunction, as well as separating
elements of a list.

It is not interchangeable with
commas.

“Mary Shelley’s works are
entertaining; they are full of
engaging ideas.”

Here the semi-colon is taking the
place of a conjunction such as
“because”.

They can be used to separate two thoughts in a
compound sentence. For example:

“They failed to convince the jury; however,
the judge issued a suspended sentence.”

Another way of expressing this information
would be in two separate sentences.

However, wanting the two facts to be placed
together in a sentence is legitimate and this is
the way to do it. Don’t use a comma.

A colon informs the reader that what follows proves
and explains, or provides elements of, what is
referred to before:

“The system is designed to be foolproof: a user
cannot access the system without three different
user names and five passwords.”

The material after the colon explains how the
system is foolproof, providing back-up to the first
part of the sentence.
 Consistency
is important.
 Stick
with either single or double marks
throughout your academic paper.
 Familiarise
yourself with the style guides of
the journals you write for.
 Some
insist on single quote marks, others on
double quote marks.
 Don’t
mix them randomly in the same
sentence.
 She
said, “I think Lynne Truss is right when
she says ‘It’s tough being a stickler for
punctuation these days’.”
 Note
that the quote within a quote is
completed inside the sentence, so you close
that quote before you close the larger quote.