MSc. Psychology Professional Skills

1. MSc. PsychologyProfessional Skills Íde O’Sullivan Regional Writing Centre, UL www.ul.ie/rwc Regional Writing Centre

2. Writing • Critiques of presentations • Reviews of articles • Literature reviews Regional Writing Centre

3. Key Considerations Regional Writing Centre

4. The writing process • Prewriting • Drafting • Revision • Editing and Proofreading Regional Writing Centre

5. Prewriting • Planning • Evaluating the rhetorical situation, or context, into which you write • Choosing and focusing your topic • Establishing an organising principle • Gathering information • Entering the discourse on your topic • Taking notes as a strategy to avoid charges of plagiarism • Evaluating sources Regional Writing Centre

6. Planning: Assessing the rhetorical situation • Occasion • Topic • Audience • Purpose • Writer Regional Writing Centre

7. Stylistic differences that mark academic writing Complexity Formality Objectivity Accuracy Precision Explicitness Hedging Responsibility (Gillet 2008) Regional Writing Centre

8. Planning: Analysing journals • Cracking the codes of academic writing • Analysing the genre/text and modelling • Identify important criteria that will make your writing more effective • Ask yourself the following questions: • How is the paper structured? • How is the contribution articulated? • What level of context is provided? • What level of detail is used? • How long are the different sections? Regional Writing Centre

9. Planning: Analysing journals • What organisational features/patterns are in evidence? • How are arguments and counterarguments presented and structured? • What types of evidence are important? • What stylistic features are prominent? • Is the text cohesive? How does the author achieve such cohesion? • What kind(s) of persuasive devises does the author employ? • Voice? Regional Writing Centre

10. Drafting • Try to visualise your report. Work toward that vision. • Begin to structure it—establish your section headings; give them titles. These do not have to be permanent. • Examine the logical order of ideas reflected in those titles. • Do not get hung up on details; elements of the draft are subject to change in the revision stage. • Start to write the sections that you are ready to write. Regional Writing Centre

11. Drafting • Continue to reassess your rhetorical situation. • Does what you have written so far contribute to the achievement of your purpose? • Experiment with organisation and methods of development. • Don’t get bogged-down in details; focus on the big issues: organisation and logical flow. Regional Writing Centre

12. Revision • Is your paper logically organised? • A good way to check the logical flow of your ideas is to outline your report AFTER you’ve completed your draft. • How did you introduce your topic? By giving it definition? Describing its development? Explaining what it is? • Does each section contribute to your reader’s understanding of your topic? Does your report service your purpose, aims, and objectives? Regional Writing Centre

13. Revising • Outline each section. How does each paragraph contribute to our understanding of the topic of that section? • Take a close look at paragraphs: Does each paragraph have a central idea? Does it have unity? Is it coherent and well developed? • Is there a correspondence between the title of your report, your section headings and sub-headings and the central ideas in your paragraphs? Regional Writing Centre

14. Revising • Do the methods used to illuminate your topic lead to logical discovery? • No truths are self-evident. • Claims have to be defended with evidence. • Processes have to be described and explained; • Design features and research methods have to be justified; • The justification for generalisations and conclusions need to be made explicit; • The criteria used to qualify our results also needs to be explicitly put forward and evaluated for objectivity; • Underlying assumptions need to be evaluated for their objectivity. Regional Writing Centre

15. Editing and proofreading • Once the report is cogent, it must be made to be coherent. • Work methodically, checking one feature at a time. • Do not exclude formatting issues. • Editing and proofreading is more than just grammar and punctuation; it is also about voice, rhythm, tone, style and clarity. Regional Writing Centre

16. Editing and proofreading • Check for ambiguity • Check for comma splices, run-ons, stringy sentences and fragments. • Check for how sentences introduce new information: is it in the beginning of the sentence or at the end? • Check that you use sentence types that are appropriate for your discipline. • Check word order and usage. • Check for agreement: Subject/verb; pronoun or noun substitute/ antecedent or concatenation. • Check for bias. • Check for obstacles to clarity: • Poorly chosen words • Vague references • Clichés and trite language • Jargon • Inappropriate connotations Regional Writing Centre

17. Editing and proofreading • Check for plagiarism • Check the form of your in-text citations and of your full references in your References page. • Check the content of your citations. Is everything that should be there there? • Check that paraphrases are not too close to the original. • Check that all figures, tables and graphs are captioned and cited (below figures and graphs; above tables) • Check that any borrowed ideas, words or methods of organising information are referenced and clearly marked. Regional Writing Centre

18. Logical choices and unity of purpose • Every choice serves to defend a claim, answer a question, or confirm a hypothesis • Word, phrase, sentence-structure • Does the choice satisfy audience expectations • Does it speak to your authorial credibility • Does it further your argument, analysis, Regional Writing Centre

19. Arguments & logic • A good argument will have, at the very least: • a thesis that declares the writer's position on the problem at hand; • an acknowledgment of the opposition that nods to, or quibbles with other points of view; • a set of clearly defined premises that illustrate the argument's line of reasoning; • evidence that validates the argument's premises; • a conclusion that convinces the reader that the argument has been soundly and persuasively made. (Dartmouth Writing Program 2005) Regional Writing Centre

20. Flow • Logical method of development • Effective transition signals • Good signposting • Consistent point of view • Conciseness (careful word choice) • Clarity of expression • Paragraph structure • Unity • Coherence Regional Writing Centre

21. Writing a Critique Regional Writing Centre

22. Writing a critique • Making a claim • Argument • Evidence • Counterargument • Audience • Reference to the literature • Critical reading • Evaluation • Synthesis • Credibility Regional Writing Centre

23. Useful Strategies Regional Writing Centre

24. Getting started • Where and when do you write? • Why are you not writing? • “I don’t feel ready to write.” • Writers’ block • Getting unstuck • Writing to prompts/freewriting (write anything) • Set writing goals • Write regularly • Integrate writing into your thinking • Break it down into a manageable process Regional Writing Centre

25. Outlining (Murray 2006) • Title and draft introduction • Level 1 outlining • Main headings • Level 2 outlining • Sub-headings • Level 3 outlining • Decide on content Regional Writing Centre

26. Writing in layers (Murray 2006: 125-27) • Outline the structure: write your section heading for the research paper. • Write a sentence or two on the contents of each section. • List out sub-headings for each section. • Write an introductory paragraph for each section. • At the top of each section, write the word count requirement, draft number and date. Regional Writing Centre

27. Writing a ‘page 98 paper’ • My research question is … • Researchers who have looked at this subject are … • They argue that … • Debate centres on the issue of … • There is work to be done on … • My research is closest to that of X in that … • My contribution will be … (Murray 2006:104) Regional Writing Centre

28. Dialogue about writing • Peer-review • Generative writing • The “writing sandwich” (Murray 2005:85): writing, talking, writing • Writing “buddies” (Murray and Moore 2006:102) • Writers’ groups • Engaging in critiques of one another’s work allows you to become effective critics of your own work. Regional Writing Centre

29. Resources • Ebest, S.B., Alred, G., Brusaw, C.T. and Oliu, W.E. (2005) Writing from A to Z: The Easy-to-use Reference Handbook, 5th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. • Hacker, D. (2006) A Writer’s Reference, 6th edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. • Regional Writing Centre, UL http://www.ul.ie/rwc/ • Strunk, W. and White, E.B. (2000) The Elements of Style, 4th ed. New York: Longman. • Using English for Academic Purposes http://www.uefap.com/index.htm • The Writer’s Garden http://www. cyberlyber.com/writermain.htm • The OWL at Purdue http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ • The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill http://www.unc.edu/depts /wcweb/handouts/index.html Regional Writing Centre

30. Works cited • Dartmouth Writing Program (2006) “Logic and Argument” [Online], available: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/toc.shtml [accessed 08 Jan. 2008]. • Elbow, P. (1998) Writing without Teachers (2nd edition). New York: Oxford University Press. • Murray, R. (2005) Writing for Academic Journals. UK: Open University Press. • Murray, R. (2006) How to Write a Thesis (2nd edition). UK: Open University Press. • Murray, R. and Moore, S. (2006) The Handbook of Academic Writing: A Fresh Approach. UK: Open University Press. Regional Writing Centre