1 Good practice in writing This unit is a general guide and will introduce you to the principles of good practice that can be applied to all writing. If you work on developing these, you will have strong basic (or ‘core’) skills to apply in any writing situation. For assistance with specific aspects of any course you are to study, always refer to any guidance notes or handbooks that have been provided. This unit won't solve all your difficulties immediately; developing your writing skills is an ongoing proces
Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: understand what writing an assignment involves; identify their strength and weaknesses; consider the functions of essays and reports; develop writing skills, whatever the stage they have reached.
8.1 Introduction to improving your skills in problem solving This key skill develops your problem-solving skills in your studies, work or other activities over a period of time. To tackle this key skill, you will need to plan your work over at least 3–4 months to give yourself enough time to practise and improve your skills, to seek feedback from others, and to monitor your progress and evaluate your strategy. Problem solving runs through many other activities and, rather like the key skill ‘Improving own learning and performance’, it can b
5.5.2 Use the views of others to guide your presentation Asking others to read, listen to and comment on the presentation of your results can give you important feedback on your work. Think about who you can ask to provide you with constructive criticism and helpful comments on your work. To help others comment effectively, be clear about what you want them to focus on. For example do you want comments on technical detail, accuracy of content, quality of argument, general structure, grammar and spelling, presentation of results, and so on? Decide h
3 Key skills assessment units This section gives advice and guidance to help you compile and present a portfolio of selected work. You are strongly advised to read through this section so that you have an idea of what is expected. The key skills assessment units provide an opportunity for you to integrate your development of key skills with your work or study. You may choose to concentrate on skills that you need to develop and improve for your job, for a new course, or personally to help you keep abreast of new dev
Learning outcomes By the end of this section you should be able to: develop a strategy for using communication skills over an extended period of time; monitor and critically reflect on your use of communication skills, adapting your strategy as necessary, to produce the quality of outcomes required; evaluate your overall strategy and present outcomes.
1.1 Communicating information With a heading like this one, you may be wondering if this unit has suddenly turned into a travel brochure. If it had, would you carry on reading if there were no pictures of the places you could visit? I certainly wouldn't. I hesitate to use the old saying about ‘one picture saves a thousand words’, but if I didn't mention it you would be thinking it. Pictures or diagrams can be very evocative and thought-provoking, but they can also communicate a lot of information very quickly.
1.3.4 Stage 2: Find a way in Bearing in mind your analysis of the overt purpose of the piece of writing, whether it is explicitly social science or art, politics, entertainment etc., try to establish its basic point, its most obvious message. What is the title or headline; is it clear and ‘factual’, does it refer to some previous debate or require some sort of previous knowledge? Are there sub-headings and can you get an idea of how the ‘story’ goes from them? Skim read the introduction and the conclusion. Can yo
8.4 Referencing quotes Quoted material can add to a discussion significantly. It can offer a summary of points that you have explored, or provide an example or even enable you to contrast two different definitions. However, quotes should not be seen as a substitute for your own words. They should be used sparingly. Moreover, quoting material involves the development of particular skills, those of referencing, integrating and selecting. As with ideas, you need to reference the source of the quote that you use as fol
8.2 Writing in your own words Active reading, or reading and thinking, are bound up with writing in your own words. If you read materials in a passive way, you are much more likely to copy out chunks word for word when you are note taking, and in the process generate very long notes indeed! Similarly, if you do not spend time thinking about what you have read, asking questions and checking your understanding, you will be tempted to copy out difficult bits or simply try to reorder the author's words. In the latter case you
6 Extracting a summary In developing short notes you are already beginning to extract key ideas from the text. To assist you further in this you might also find it helpful to bring the points you have highlighted and/or made short notes about together. This involves the use of link sentences and words, perhaps even the addition of short quotes taken from the text directly, and examples or additional words of explanation. In this way your notes build up into a summary which you can use more easily. 2.3 Reading techniques: focused reading Have a go at reading The Scotsman article again, this time in a more focused way. Think about each section of the text, breaking off at regular intervals in order to identify and extract the main points or examples, a 3.4 Experiencing multiple sclerosis: a case illustration The idea of a body–world interconnection and distinction between objective and subjective body is explored further in the following extract, drawn from some phenomenological research Linda Finlay conducted on one person's (Ann's) lived bodily experience of having MS (Finlay, 2003). In the extract, the focus is on the process by which Finlay came to analyse what Ann's body feels like subjectively. Her story – obtained via an in-depth interview (see Box below) – emphasises the way her sen 3.3 A body–world interconnection Our consciousness of our bodies remains fundamentally tied up with our everyday embodied activities and relationships. The body thus represents both our particular view of the world as well as our Being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1962 [1927]). Martin Heidegger (2001) draws a distinction between corporeal things and the body, questioning whether the sense of embodied selfhood that we all possess needs to coincide with the limits of a corporeal body. The corporeal thing stops 1 Embodiment Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage – he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body. (Nietzsche, 1961 [1883], p. 62) At first glance you might be curious about why we're including a unit on bodies, or rather embodiment – the process or state of living in a body – in relation to social psychology. The body has gen 3.4 The ‘flanker’ effect A potential problem for the feature integration theory is the fact that the time taken to understand the meaning of a printed word can be influenced by other, nearby words. Of itself, this is not surprising, because it is well known that one word can prime (i.e. speed decisions to) another related word; the example nurse – doctor was given in Secti 2.6 Summary of Section 2 The results of the visual attention experiments we have considered can be interpreted as follows. Attention can be directed selectively towards different areas of the visual field, without the need to re-focus. The inability to report much detail from brief, masked visual displays appears to be linked to the need to assemble the various information components. The visual information is captured in parallel, but assemb 2.5 Masking and attention Before I summarise the material in this section, and we move on to consider attentional processes with clearly-seen displays, it would be appropriate to consider the relevance of the masking studies to the issue of attention. We began the whole subject by enquiring about the fate of material which was, in principle, available for processing, but happened not to be at the focus of attention. Somehow we have moved into a different enquiry, concerning the fate of material that a participant was 2.4 Rapid serial visual presentation It has been known for a long time that backward masking can act in one of two ways: integration and interruption (Turvey, 1973). When the SOA between target and mask is very short, integration occurs; that is, the two items are perceived as one, with the result that the target is difficult to report, just as when one word is written over another. Of more interest is masking by interruption, which is the type we have been considering in the previous section. It occurs at longer S 2.3 Towards a theory of parallel processing When people are asked to guess about masked material, they are commonly able to provide some information, but it often lacks detail. For example, if participants in a Sperling-type experiment have recalled three letters, but are pressed for more, then they can often provide one or two. However, they generally do not know information such as whereabouts in the display the letters occurred, or what colour they were. These, of course, are exactly the kinds of detail that can be used to select it
Activity 4
