3.2 Using diagrams of your own choice and design This option is the most challenging and most rewarding, as it clearly shows that you have explored and analysed the source material and reworked it for yourself. In many cases, the source material may not contain any diagrams, simply text or numbers, perhaps expressed as a table. Alternatively, you may have had to make some specific observations or undertake an experiment to produce your own data. In this case, you may be expected to produce a diagram to enhance or improve your assignment. If
5.1.9 Music
Blom, E., revised by Cumings, D. (eds) (1991) The New Everyman Dictionary of Music, London, Dent.
Isaacs, A., and Martin, E. (eds) (1982) Dictionary of Music, London, Sphere.
3.6 Taking an objective, analytical stance One of the things I said an essay should be is ‘objective’. What does that mean? Being objective about something means standing back from it and looking at it coolly. It means focusing your attention on the ‘object’, on what you are discussing, and not on yourself and your own (subjective) feelings about it. Your ideas should be able to survive detailed inspection by other people who are not emotionally committed to them. An essay should argue by force of reason, not emot
2.6.1 Philip's essay
Strengths
a reasonable understanding of the general issues Ellis deals with a good basic structure some good sequences of argument a promising feel for language fluency of expression
Weaknesses
the wrong title and consequently a lack of focus argument is loose-knit in places – some points a
2.5.4. Choosing the right words and phrases Both Philip and Hansa occasionally use words and phrases that don't really do the job they want. We saw, for instance, that Philip uses the word ‘resemblance’ when actually he means ‘contrast’. Here are some other examples from his writing. 2.4 Analysing Hansa's essay To refresh your memory, look again at Hansa's essay and the notes you made earlier. The first thing I noticed is that her essay starts with the title she was set. It also comes to a conclusion that tries to answer the question in the title, so straight away it has some important strengths compared to Philip's. From the start she gets stuck into the argument, making a purposeful attack on the question in her opening sentences. And, while she covers a lot of the same ground as Philip, she devel 1.3 Developing your essay-writing ability To develop your skill in writing essays you need to address two basic questions. What does a good essay look like? How do you set about producing one? We will look at the first of these questions in this chapter and the second in the next. Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: Table 1: Source: Transport Statistics Great Britain, 2001, Department for Transport. Crown copyright material is reproduced under Class Licence Number C01W0000065 with the permission of the Controller if HMSO and the Que 1.4 Conclusion The aim of this unit has been to try to draw together work on numbers and text, and to try to be helpful to those who, like me, find numbers and statistics rather unapproachable. Evidence is used in social science to convince us of the value of a claim, and is a crucial element in our evaluation of theoretical perspectives. 2.1 Reading techniques: scanning There are three main techniques that you can use in order to read in such a way as to achieve your purpose: scanning, skimming, and focused reading. Let's take each in turn. The technique of scanning is a useful one to use if you want to get an overview of the text you are reading as a whole – its shape, the focus of each section, the topics or key issues that are dealt with, and so on. In order to scan a piece of text you might look for sub-headings or identify key words and p 1.2 How do you read? A good way of getting started on developing your reading and note-taking skills is to think about how you read now. The short extract reproduced below is taken from The Scotsman and is a journalistic piece of wr 5.1 Introduction Modern techniques for revealing where and when different parts of the brain become active have recently provided a window on the processes of attention. For example, one of these brain-scanning techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has been used to show the behaviour of an area of the brain that responds to speech. It turns out also to become activated in a person viewing lips making speech movements in the absence of sound. For this to happen there must be connecti 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 2.5 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 2.3 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 References 3.4 Biological approaches Certain kinds of psychological disturbances may be seen as ‘malfunctions’ of the brain. If a psychological problem has an obvious biological explanation, then it may be possible to direct therapeutic approaches at this level. However, as we have seen, it is difficult to identify precise biological causes for complex psychological phenomena. Even if this were possible, it would not always be practicable to use treatments to change the underlying biological factors. Genetic ‘explanationsâ 2.5.1 Highly unsaturated fatty acids As we saw in Section 1, ‘medical’ approaches to some psychological conditions have focused on biochemistry and the use of corresponding drug treatments. Very little research of this kind has been applied to dyslexia. However, emerging evidence suggests that there may be a biochemical contribution involving abnormal metabolism of highly unsaturated fatty acids (HUFA) – essential substances that play a key role in brain development and the maintenance of normal brain function. In f 2.2.2 ‘Visual deficit’ hypotheses Samuel Orton was one of the earliest and most influential researchers into dyslexia, although he used the term strephosymbolia – literally meaning ‘twisted symbols’. He noticed that children with specific reading difficulties often wrote letters back to front, confused letters such as ‘b’ and ‘d’, and would swap the position of letters within a word during spelling (e.g. ‘was’ might be written ‘saw’). From these and other observations, he suggested that their read 1.5.2 Discrepancy definitions The label is given if there is a discrepancy between perceived potential to learn to read (as indicated by general ability) and actual level of reading achievement. The most common way of diagnosing dyslexia is to look for a discrepancy between someone's general ability as measured by an IQ assessment and his or her performance on standardised measures of reading and spelling. However, there are
Philip's words
More accurate words
Paragraph 1
‘port
Tables
Key point
Activity 1