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
2.5.4. 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. 2.3.1 The title The first thing I noticed about Philip's essay is that although it begins with a title it is not the one he was given. This immediately creates two problems. If I were Philip's tutor I would find it difficult to weigh up his essay against the challenge he was actually set. The title he has made up is not a good one, so it weakens his essay from the outset. Philip's title doesn't pose a question for him to answe 2.1 A lack of insight? One of the curious things about learning to write essays is that you are seldom offered much insight into what you might be setting out to produce. You know only too well what your essays look like and what your tutor says about them, but you don't know what else you might have done. For instance, you have very little idea what other people's essays are like and what comments they get back. Perhaps you are told your essay ought to be ‘more structured’ or ‘less subjective†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. 1.3.7 Summary We can learn to use writing of all sorts as evidence by practising how to interpret it and by becoming aware of the conventions attached to its primary purpose for example as personal testimony, journalism, commercially produced material, such as market research and academic writing as well as material produced specifically through research such as interview data. When approaching a piece of writing:  1.3.6 Stage 4: Extracting the information You probably feel that you now have all the information the piece of writing contains or that you need, but now we need to categorise the information it contains and to look for connections with our own social scientific concerns. This is the difficult bit, and we don't expect you to be expert at it yet.
1.3.2 Stages in reading qualitative evidence As with numbers, we need to approach qualitative evidence systematically and with purpose, and not just assume we know what it means. 1.3.1 What evidence are we reading? Social scientists use particular methods to gather qualitative evidence, from observation to interview, but they also use autobiographical accounts, journalism, and other documentary material to flesh out and add meaning to statistics. As with reading numbers, reading textual evidence requires us to practise, to set time aside to learn how to do it, and to understand the conventions of writing which operate in the different forms of writing we encounter. One of the main pr 1.2.4 Stage 2: Find a way in It's easy to be distracted by the surface appearance of a diagram, but we are really interested in the underlying message. This is rather like the distinction made between the content and context reading of photographs. Once you are sure that you know what the main heading means, focus on a particular element and think it through. If it is a bar chart, for instance, pick on one of the bars and tell yourself what it represents, what it is telling you. Is it showing a percentage or a total? Wha 1.2.1 What evidence are we reading? Although we live in a society where a huge amount of information is available in the form of numbers, some of us still feel a mental fog descend when we are asked to deal with them. This is because numerical information is information in a very condensed and abstract form. A number on its own means very little. You have to learn to read it. Numeracy (the ability to work with numbers) is a skill that we can learn. It is a very useful skill, because it allows us to understand very quickly the < 3.1 Maps as history Maps represent knowledge of the time and space within which they are compiled and produced. In this way they form part of the historic record. An old map is a picture, albeit selective, of the past and forms a baseline for studying change. The first edition of the Irish Ordnance Survey (see Map 2 below) provides a picture of the lands 8.5 Constructing bibliographies At the end of your assignments you need to include a bibliography or list of references. This is an alphabetical list of all the sources that you have used – each chapter, book and article that you refer to in the main body of your discussion. Bibliographies take a particular form and usually involve listing the: author's name, date of publication, title of the piece, and details of the publisher. 8.3 Acknowledging the sources of ideas Even when you have used your own words it is essential that you acknowledge the source of the ideas you re-present. This entails making a note of the author and date of publication of the material from which you extract key concepts and points. So at the end of our summary of the Croall extract above, we would need to acknowledge that we got our information from that source by putting (Croall, 1998) at the end of the relevant paragraph. If you use more than one author's work in a paragraph th 7.1 Processing meanings Reading and thinking requires you to begin to process the material you read in preparation for re-presenting it in assessments. Initially, processing happens in your head. Selecting what to identify and extract will start the process off. Summarizing the arguments continues this process and, crucially, gets you started on reproducing ideas in your own words. The next stage is to develop your notes further by thinking more consciously about the material you have read and the points you 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 Starting with psychology Acknowledgements The material below is contained in Social Psychology Matters, Wendy Holloway, Helen Lucey and Anne Phoenix, published in association with Open University Press, 2007. The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under creative commons licence. Grateful acknowledgement is m 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 3.2 Consciousness of the body Phenomenological theorists distinguish between the subjective body (as lived and experienced) and the objective body (as observed and scientifically investigated). These are not two different bodies as such (phenomenologists pride themselves on overcoming dualisms!); rather they are different facets of our experience and consciousness. The body-subject, or subjective body, is the body-as-it-is-lived. I do not simply possess a body; I am my body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962
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Activity 1
The most ‘important and greatest puzzle’ we face as humans is ourselves (Boring, 1950, p. 56). Humans are a puzzle – one that is complex, subtle and multi-layered, and it gets even more complicated as we evolve over time and change in different contexts.
When answering the question ‘What makes us who we are?’, psychologists put forward a range of explanations about why people feel, think and behave the way they do. Just when psychologists seem to understand one bit of ‘who we are’
