For Students

As a highschool student, I was better at drawing than writing!

Writing an academic paper can be a stomach-churning mix of boredom, terror, and confusion! But constant practice will help you improve!

Academic Writing

In my former job at Korea University I was also a member of CAMPUS Asia's thesis support program, which provided mentoring and support for students as they conducted research and wrote their graduate theses. This job gave me many opportunities to help students craft more effective research outputs.

In truth, however, writing never came easy to me as a student. Although I was a voracious reader, I was never able to just sit down and write flawless prose. Rather, each idea had to be laboriously squeezed out of my brain and never looked quite the same on the paper. The problem became starkly evident when I received a C+ in my first English class in university. Even worse, I thought that I had written a perfect term paper until I got the professor's feedback!

But sometimes a C+ teaches us more than an A. After that disaster, I made a conscious attempt to improve my writing. Part of this process was reading more carefully, identifying techniques used to make arguments, and lots of practice. The materials here are dedicated to helping students make the same journey as my younger self. Even if you are not naturally good at writing, don't lose hope. The skills and techniques of academic writing can be taught and they can be learnt. You just need to be willing to start the journey!

Critical Reading Form

As I often say in class, if you hope to write a good essay, you need to read a lot! Here is a downloadable form that students can use to prepare their literature reviews. Each time you read a book or article in class, fill out as many of the categories as possible, noting the page numbers for exact quotes. Using this form helps you keep track of secondary literature. It also lets you practice your critical reading/analysis skills.

Source Note form.docx

References

Why do we use references?

References are important for two reasons. First, a citation acknowledges the ideas and work of other scholars. This allows the reader to see which opinions, ideas, and arguments in the essay are your own and which are from other scholars. Second, citations allow future researchers to replicate your work and fact-check your data sources. In short, the citations in your essay are telling the reader that if they read all of the same sources then they will reach the same conclusions as you.

When do we use references?

You need to use citations when you are using another scholar's ideas or when you need to back something up from your data. Something that is common knowledge or basic knowledge does not need to be cited, i.e. the Republic of Korea was founded in 1948. More controversial or debatable points need to be supported with a citation, i.e. President W was paranoid (Smith, 2002: 35). You should also cite your source if the information is obscure, difficult to find, or potentially questionable. Direct quotations as well as paraphrased passages need to be cited. As students, it is your responsibility to clearly indicate all sources that you use and where you use them. When in doubt, cite your source.

Do I give the page numbers?

You do not need to give a page number if you are paraphrasing the overall idea of a work. However, if you are paraphrasing information found in a specific location in that work then you need to give the exact page numbers where it was found. Direct quotations, of course, always require page numbers. If you are citing from a source, like a website or an EPUB edition of an ebook, which has no page numbers then you should specify n.p. or no pagination. If possible, though, give as much identifying information as possible. So, in the case of an ebook, cite the chapter or sub-section that you are referring to.

How do I paraphrase?

A common problem in students' writing is that they do not properly paraphrase the sources they are using and unintentionally commit plagiarism. If you are paraphrasing a sentence you must completely change the sentence order and the words. Paraphrasing a sentence means that you are taking the idea but nothing else. Simply changing some words around is not sufficient and counts as plagiarism.

For a useful example of paraphrasing see https://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/academic-writing/avoiding-plagiarism-paraphrasing

Click to check it out!

Research Tool

I started using this software during my MA and it was a lifesaver! You can store PDFs, notes, and bibliographical information and use the citation add-ons to create footnotes and bibliographies. Best of all, it is free!

Of course, like all automation, there are dangers lurking beneath the surface. Make sure that you input your sources accurately the first time or you will always be citing them incorrectly. Also, it struggles with some types of sources and citation styles. Nevertheless, this tool is fantastic for students and researchers dealing with large quantities of sources.

Avoid the Midnight Monster!

Maybe sometimes you stay awake all night working on an assignment and then submit it in to the professor the next morning right on the deadline. It is probably still warm from the printer as you hand it over. Does this sound familiar? Sometimes its even a thrill, racing against the clock into the wee hours of the morning when the rest of the world is asleep. In fact, sometimes an epic all-night writing session really inspires us and leads us down paths we'd never otherwise take. But realistically you probably just cost yourself a letter grade, if not more, because you never adequately proofread it. By the time you get to graduate school or the private sector this behavior is increasingly untenable.

But I am not going to tell you not to do it. Heck, do it as much as you'd like, but allow me to suggest one small change. Instead of staying up all night finishing your paper hours before it is due, why not stay up all night getting it done a week or two early? Then put it in your desk drawer and forget about it. A week later you can come back to it and fix all of the horrible mistakes you probably made. You probably won't even remember half of the things you wrote, making it very easy to spot typos, logical fallacies, and those mysterious half-typed words from when you were nodding off at the keyboard. This was one of my strategies in undergrad and it combined the best of both worlds. You get to experience those flashes of sleep-deprived inspiration at 3 am in the morning as well as the analytical benefits of the hard light of day. Have you ever looked at something you wrote and wondered "What the heck was I thinking?" Isn't it better to have this realization before its graded?

Looks like that guy misquoted a source and fell victim to the Midnight Monster!

Essay Exams

These comments are compiled from the feedback that I gave to one of my classes last semester after reading their take-home final exams. I decided to post this because someone told me that it contains valuable general advice for any student about to write a take-home exam. Just to give a bit more context, this test consisted of a short reading (an editorial by Ramin Bahrani, the director of the movie Fahrenheit 451) and then an essay question asking students to link course concepts with the argument contained in the reading.

"....Overall, I was very pleased by the quality of the final exam essays and almost everyone had some awesome insights into the article by Ramin Bahrani. Yet, the papers tended to fall into one of two categories. First, the best papers had a clear argument or thesis statement given at the start of the essay which managed to integrate all of the sub-questions into a series of succinct statements or claims. This was not easy to do because the final exam was asking you to do several things at once:

Analyze Bahrani’s perspective of technology and agree/disagree
Analyze how much control we have over technology, specifically the role of rhetoric and imagination (and if there are limits to our reflexivity when it comes to technology)
Discuss the biggest (technological) challenge that we face in the 21st century

Only a few students managed to integrate all of these ideas into a coherent argument. The ability to compress this material into a seamless argument is an important part of demonstrating your command of the course material and is something that you should try to do in future classes. For those of you who did this, it was an impressive accomplishment. Thank you.

The best papers also went out of their way to exhaustively cite and discuss class materials, especially course readings. Simply mentioning a class concept, like Actor Network Theory (ANT), is important because it means that you know that much. But including a citation to the specific locations of several course readings that discuss the concept is proving to me that you read the materials and know them thoroughly. ANT, if you recall, suggests that scholars use citations to overawe other researchers with the strength of her/his network. Unfortunately, many of you did not do this, even when discussing Actor Network Theory. The use of outside materials was great but could not compensate for a lack of citations to class materials. As Bruno Latour reminds us: “A paper that does not have references is like a child without an escort walking at night in a big city it does not know: isolated, lost, anything may happen to it.”[1]

Moreover, the papers that fell into the second group tended not to have a central argument at the start. Instead, they slowly built up to an argument that appeared at the end of the paper or somewhere in the middle. This felt like the author was thinking as they wrote, instead of delivering a fully developed idea. Another problem was that some introductions were too general. They told the reader what the paper was going to do instead of giving an actual argument. In an assignment that was only five pages long, you needed to make every word count. Structuring your argument as efficiently as possible allows you to convey more information. Compare for example, these two introductions. Which one is conveying more information to the reader?

This paper will carefully examine Ramin Bahrani’s argument. It will first evaluate it using SCOT theory and then criticize it. Next the paper argues that we cannot be reflexive about technology. Finally, the paper will discuss the greatest technological challenge in the future and argues that it is not a problem because of ANT theory.
This paper suggests that Ramin Bahrani’s argument, seemingly a classical example of normative determinism, should be interpreted as a social constructivist’s rhetorical call for more reflexive human agents in the face of our greatest challenge—the digitalization of knowledge. However, Bahrani’s call to action is unnecessary because the process of digitalization empowers ordinary people by creating more inclusive networks.

Other papers did not have a central argument at all, but simply discussed each sub-section one after another, sometimes without transitions, which meant that each strand failed to stand together into a cohesive whole. This was particularly jarring for the reader because it felt like four or five mini-papers stitched together instead of a carefully crafted argument. In an open book exam, you are not being tested on your ability to throw facts at the reader. Rather you are being tested on your ability to merge these facts into an insightful overarching argument that is persuasive, logical, and original. In the end, the papers in the second category were not as polished as those where the argument was integrated thoughtfully into a single edifice.

The second category papers also failed to extensively cite course readings. They only had a few references and/or were conspicuously bare of citations to class materials. If you do not cite any class readings, and only discuss class concepts in a general sense, you are at a distinct disadvantage to someone who extensively cited course readings. Some of you cited outside material, which is great, but this does not replace the need to cite course materials.

Also worth noting, some students mischaracterized or misread Bahrani’s argument and did not try to support their claims. While the whole point of the assignment was to see you be creative and interpret the material, always make sure that you are offering support (in the form of quotations or extra explanation) for your interpretations of the source material. While I did not penalize anyone for what seemed to be misinterpretations, it is something to be careful about in the future. You cannot just make a claim about Bahrani. You must back up your claims with examples from the text....."

[1] Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 33.

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