Entries Tagged 'Academia' ↓

I had a forehead slap moment last Tuesday when I was proofreading a letter my wife had written to a military officer. She’s doing some research on families of Army National Guardsmen who have deployed, and she needed to write a letter to an officer to keep the research on track. She asked me to proofread it because I can put on the military hat and look at her writing through the eyes of the person she was writing for.

So I put on the hat and took a quick look at the message. She wrote it in Mail.app, and all I initially saw was about 10 paragraphs composed of four or five long sentences. No headings, no sub-bullets…just a lot of paragraphs and a lot of big words. The alarms went off, because I knew there was no way in hell that her letter was going to be read thoroughly. It was just too unapproachable for her audience, and furthermore, he likely would have been reading it on a Crackberry.

I begin to restructure the message a bit, and noticed something very interesting: the key point to be gleaned from a paragraph was at the bottom of the paragraph. I thought about it a bit more, and it dawned on me: that’s why people have trouble reading academic writing.

Look at some of the better posts you’ve read online recently and see how they flow. They generally start with a key idea at the head and have a few sentences that flesh that idea out. Lists are paradigmatic of this structure; an item is introduced and qualified, an item is introduced and qualified, rinse and repeat. Slap an introductory paragraph (which starts with the key idea of the post) and a concluding paragraph (which may still start with the key idea of the post) and you have the post structure that makes up 75% of most blogs, this one included.

Academic writing is usually just the opposite of that structure. We’ll start with a transition sentence that gets the reader from the previous paragraph into the one we’re currently on. We’ll spend a few sentences constructing and qualifying the idea and finish the paragraph with the topic sentence. Non-academic paragraph structure descends from key ideas to their supporting ideas, whereas academic paragraph ascends from supporting ideas to the key idea. So, when people feel like they have to wade through an entire paragraph to get a point in academic writing, it’s because, in fact, they do have to wade through the entire paragraph to get to the point.

For a case in point, look at the structure of the following paragraph:

Aquinas?s motivation for advancing the Doctrine of Double Effect comes from his absolutist ethical perspective. One of the counter-intuitive results of absolutist ethical systems, in general, is that they deem as impermissible acts that many reasonable people find intuitively permissible. If one is never allowed to harm another person, then an agent cannot defend herself in cases where she is threatened, despite the folk intuition that people are morally permitted to defend themselves when they are unjustly threatened. Aquinas is attempting to make room for folk intuition while still holding onto the idea that it?s wrong to harm people–so he moves the discussion from what one does to what one intends to do. So, it turns out for Aquinas that the general moral prohibition against harming other people is, at best, misstated; the general moral prohibition should be against intentionally harming other people, and his theory attempts to flesh out conditions for something counting as an intentional harm.

This paragraph is an excerpt from one of my more readable philosophical essays. You can probably figure out that the paragraph before this one talks about Aquinas’s absolutist ethical perspective. The sentences in between are run-ups to the final point that “the general moral prohibition [against harming people] should be against intentionally harming other people.”

I have looked through a few representative samples of academic writing and my writing is not idiosyncratic in structure. It’s a product of the academic culture, and we train people to write this way and reinforce that training through the academic rewards structure.

I worry, though, that we are doing them a disservice, for we are training and rewarding a writing style that doesn’t translate well outside of our ivory towers. Furthermore, we may be doing ourselves a disservice, since we then have to struggle with our own writing once we’re out of the academic bubble.

It took me awhile last week to translate my wife’s letter. (I dropped it into a word processor to save it as a PDF, and it wound up being 2.5 pages, single-spaced). In the end, we compromised and just bolded the key idea, since there was really no way to restructure her letter without a massive rewrite. The ironic thing about the letter was that it was a very, very well written letter…if it were going to an academic audience.

Dustin over at Lifehack wrote a nice post for students on how to improve their writing. Last night I was going through the first round of this with my students, as well. The point I found most insightful was the following:

Start in the middle. One of the biggest problems facing writers of all kinds is figuring out how to start. Rather than staring at a blank screen until it?s burned into your retinas trying to think of something awe-inspiring and profound to open your paper with, skip the introduction and jump in at paragraph two. You can always come back and write another paragraph at the top when you?re done ? but then again, you might find you don?t need to. As it turns out, the first paragraph or so are usually the weakest, as we use them to warm up to our topic rather than to do any useful work.

Students often fret entirely too much about their introduction when they’re trying to write and get a block. The last thing that most procrastinators need is an addition thing to keep them from writing. My advice to my students is very much along the same lines: write out your thesis and dive into the body of your paper. If you seem to have shown something different than what your thesis stated, change your thesis instead of the body of your paper. The paper being turned in isn’t like a novel you’re being paid to write along a certain story line…you can change your mind.
Get the first draft out, read it, and then compose your introduction. By doing so, you’re sure that your introduction actually matches the rest of the paper without trying to make the rest of the paper match your introduction. Revise, rinse, and repeat.

I had an amazing thing happen this semester: every student turned in every assignment on time. I don’t think that happened due to the caliber of students or the time I was teaching the course, for those things didn’t make that big of a change in other dimensions of the course. The reason why it happened is that I changed my policy on late work: I simply stated that work not received by the deadline would not be graded and given a “0″ for the assignment.

My wife had started the very same policy a couple of semesters before I had and she found that she significantly decreased the amount of late submissions. Keeping up with students turning things in late, trying to figure out how much to dock their projects, remembering to get those late submissions with the batch of others, etc. proved to be a pain in the arse. That alone proved to be enough of a reason to implement such a policy.

But there are at least two other really good reasons to do this. The first of these deals with the individual student. Having loose late policies actually encourages students to disregard the given deadline for the course. Why? Because, given all of the other hard-deadline items that students have to contend with, it’s more practical to study and/or cram for that Calculus exam that must be taken on Wednesday rather than on that Philosophy (in my case) paper due on that same day but that can be put off. Their efforts in cramming and studying will likely have more impact on their Calculus grade than the negative impact that they’d receive on their paper would have on their grade, depending on the policy.

When I was a TA, I had a professor that had us dock something like a third of a letter grade for every two days late the paper was submitted; weekends counted as one day, as well. Their papers were generally due Friday, and it worked out that they could turn something in on the second Monday after the paper was due and still only have one letter grade docked from their paper. That late submission policy caused me loads of headaches. Given that I tried to have papers graded and turned back out two weeks after they turned them in, it was not at all uncommon for me to be turning back (what I thought was) all of their papers only to have a handful or so trickle in, causing me to either batch them with the next slew of papers, or redo my plan for the week to do those papers. If I chose the former, not only would I have to worry about their grades being consistent with their peers’, but it took me considerably longer, because generally I’d have to reread what we’d covered previously to make sure I understood what the students were saying.

Granted, I could have emailed or caught every student in class who didn’t turn in their papers to see who was turning it in and who wasn’t, but we’re not in high school anymore. My stand on that is that it’s the student’s responsibility to make those arrangements. Furthermore, with roughly eighty students, I wasn’t about to go chasing people down who didn’t turn in their papers, even if I could remember off the top of my head who they were. So, if, while recording scores, I noticed a student didn’t turn in a paper, there was always that lingering question of whether they’d turn it in. Simply put, that’s more brainpower than I want to put on such an issue.

It was commonplace for me to hear students discuss with their peers that they’d just turn their stuff in Monday since they’d probably do better by working on it over the weekend rather than during the week. (Students have a hard time understanding how easily sound travels in classrooms–or they understand all too well and love airing out the lurid details of their escapades for their instructor’s amusement.) What really sold the fact that something was wrong with the policy was when students told me to my face that they turn things in late because the penalty is pretty much non-existent.

The second good reason to impose a hard deadline on students is that doing so prepares them for the real world. There is a creeping concern that higher education is no longer preparing students for entry into the non-academic worlds for which they supposedly go to school to prepare for. Not all business institutions have hard deadlines for policies, I’m sure, but if there is a significant effect for the business if Order X does or does not go in a given day, I don’t see many managers being pleased with their employees if they drop the ball. In such stakes, there is no late submission policy. The students we issue forth, degree in hand, have been trained to turn projects in late, and often rewarded for it. We do them no favor by encouraging this.

The beauty of the policy was the ease of its application. Not a single student asked if they could turn anything late. In those cases where they couldn’t turn it in on the day it was due (student-athletes on tournaments), they took the initiative to turn it in ahead of time. I didn’t have to strong-arm, coddle, or remind people to turn their projects in, and yet, every project was turned in on time. (Note: For this to work properly, make sure you’re explicit about the time it has to be turned in, too.) And, in case you’re worried about such things, it didn’t alter my evaluations–they didn’t make me out to be a bad guy out to get them or anything silly like that. Lastly, the gravity of the deadline made it such that I didn’t even have to give anyone a failing grade. Everything worked out smoothly, exactly the way that it should.

Get rid of those loose late submission policies. Students will adapt accordingly, and the semester will go so much easier for everyone involved.

I’m currently designing my next course and I am faced with a problem that gets me every semester: what’s the best way to teach students how to write well while balancing that objective with many others?

Many people in my department subscribe to the “look-Ma-no-hands” pedagogical principle, which asserts that the best way to learn to write papers is to learn from something you’ve already written, rather than going off of somebody else’s templates. So, we assign papers, have the students write them, and grade fairly charitably the first time around; the idea is that the light hand should alleviate the discomfort that some students feel from having to write papers blind. Having myself done this, I’ve got a few problems with this approach:

1. Students really feel that this is unfair. “How is it fair that we get graded for something that we don’t know how to do?,” is the graceful, clear way of summarizing the question asked by many of my students.
2. The light grading tends to skew what students actually would get if you graded the papers for real. It’s sometimes hard to explain to a student why they got a C on their second paper when they followed the same formula that got them an B on the first one. Responding that there was higher expectations on the second paper than the first doesn’t help unless they can see what those expectations are.
3. Some students are encouraged to turn in the Pile of Crap, since (A) they know they can reasonably argue that their poor grade is unfair and (B) they know that they’ll likely get a passing grade regardless of what they turn in.

Sidebar: A Pile of Crap is a project turned in with the absolute minimum work taken to complete it. What separates the Pile of Crap from the Last Minute Project is that the former is banking on some ambiguity in the assignment or on the student’s ability to complain or wheedle about some aspect of the assignment, whereas the Last Minute Project actually represents the student doing the best she can to complete the assignment and get the best grade possible. An example of a Pile of Crap project is a student turning in a paper that is 2.15 pages long, when the assignment calls for a three page paper, with the student asserting that the paper technically makes it to the third page (after they’ve already found the largest type-face at twelve font and have used reference footnotes to bump the page length). Even though the ploy is as obvious as a forehead-mounted prom pimple, if push came to shove, the student would likely win in an academic dispute. And students also know that you don’t have time to bother with such processes and will likely give them a decent grade not to have to deal with it.


But there’s tension from the other direction, too. If you spend too much time teaching students how to write, you do so at the cost of covering material relevant to whatever course they’re taking. An additional complication is that, frankly, many students just don’t care that their writing is par at best. This is especially problematic if your course is an elective or a course that people have to take to graduate. “Give me the grade, and as long as I pass, I don’t care.” The recognition that the hard work put into trying to teach people to write well will fall flat on many purely degree-seeking ears seems to justify not spending that much time developing our teaching agendas around teaching people to write.

And that’s just the front-side planning. Grading papers thoroughly and providing feedback on papers is time-consuming. Generally, if my students hand in a 4-5 page paper, my comments to them, if I want to be thorough about it, tend to be at least one page (single-spaced). There have been some papers where my comments have had a longer word length than the student’s paper. This is not because I am extremely picky or over-demanding or think I’m a much better writer than they are (which you can see by what you’re reading), but rather, giving constructive criticism and discussing (in writing) ways they may approach their topic differently requires a lot of thought and writing. If I plan on giving thorough comments, I estimate 25 minutes for every paper, and that tends to be pretty close. So, for a class of 30 students, that’s 12.5 hours of grading. I’m fortunate not to be carrying a 4/4 load yet, but, if I were, that’d be 50 hours of just grading to do. Assuming I do three papers (somewhat standard), that’s 150 hours of grading papers, and only papers, spread out over 18 weeks. It’d take eight hours and twenty minutes, on average, per week to complete that much grading, but we all know that papers are feast or famine, coming in at key points in the semester. Again, assuming a 4/4, you can plan on blocking off an entire week (and some change) during critical times in the semester just for grading.

So, here’s the spectrum: On one end, you have doing as little writing preparation and grading work as possible. On the other end, you have spending the time to be completely thorough in preparation and grading. I’ve considered some ways of shooting for the middle:

1. Assign the first paper, but deceptively not inform the students that it won’t be graded. In reality, it’s a draft or test-run. This satisfies the intuition that learning from what you’ve actually done is the best way to learn, but does so at the cost of you spending the time grading something that won’t be reflected in any grade. Both you and the students have done a lot of work that doesn’t count (at least this time). You also sacrifice a bit of your credibility by going this route, as part of the student-teacher relationship is built on trust.
2. Ask students who care about their writing to indicate whether they want feedback or not. This ensures that your efforts are well-spent on those students who care and not on those who just want the grade. I can attest from personal experience that two things happens with this approach: (a) no student really wants to admit that they don’t care, thinking it’ll effect your perception of them and hence their grade, and (b) students who get a grade they aren’t happy with then want to talk about it, so you end up looking at the same thing twice.
3. Assign the first paper, but tell people that it won’t be graded. This cures the anxiety of students and often frees up their thinking (meaning that you actually get some really good papers), but it also leaves plenty of room for the Pile of Crap. In my experience, most students respond only to the impact that assignments will have on their grade, not on the impact it’ll have on their scholarly development; generally, the higher the grade impact, the more work they’ll put into the assignment.
4. Assign the paper, grade it for real, and give students the option of rewriting the paper and averaging the two grades. This encourages maximum development, lets students who are happy with their grade take it and not work anymore, and thwarts some of the perceived unfairness of the turning something in blind. Perhaps more importantly, though, it also gives students an incentive to not turn in the Pile of Crap, as they know that doing so will hurt their average. However, these benefits come at the cost of your time, since you can anticipate grading at least half of the papers over again.

Option 4 seems to offer the best benefits for the least costs. This time around I’m going with it.

What’s your technique for teaching your students how to write well?

Okay, so there’s a plethora of blogs out there about personal productivity (I personally enjoy 43folders and LifeDev). However, their appeal is either based on programmers, as Merlin’s is, or is too general. I’ve often found myself asking, “How the !@#@! do I translate this good stuff into my academic world?” Generally, by the time I figure it out, I’ve already wasted too much time doing so and am now in Crisis Mode, or have gotten distracted into another form of procrastination.

So, this site is as it’s titled: Life Management for Academics. Why not time management or some such? Time management is a small piece of one’s career in academia. Granted, it may touch other components, but there are other components that are specific to academic life that are not covered by the geniuses at the other time management sites. My suggestion is that academics are different from the general PP (personal productivity) population due to our having to manage the holy Triad: teaching, research/writing, and administrivia (committees, reports, and general paperwork).

There’s also this fact: academics are never done. A paper submitted here needs reworking for presentation there. After that presentation, it needs rework for submission to publication there. If it’s accepted there, then the seeds from it may start another presentation there. Even if it doesn’t start another presentation here, maybe, just maybe, the information you’ve presented will be relevant to another project you’re either working on or will start (better file this away there, mentally, physically, or digitally…just in case). We often accept that we’ll spend our life in project polish hell, but often forget that that’s only the fire; the brimstone comes from project residue.

And here’s the final kicker for why it’s Life Management rather than Time Management: calculate the time and psychic energy required to manage the Triad, and then throw more time and psychic energy onto the fire for keeping up with project polishing and residue. How much time and energy is left? Okay, then start thinking about family, hygiene, subsistence, and sleep. Still have time and energy left? Maybe a little. What if you’d like to do anything fun or to just plain relax and do nothing? Good luck with that one.

Clearly, something has got to give. We can (A) get less to do, (B) complete all that we have to do more efficiently, or (C) quit. Granted, any of the options are up to us, but it’s unlikely that people will take the last option. After all, how long did you spend in school to do what you’re doing? This blog will focus instead on the first two options.

Here’s what you can expect to see on this blog:

• Commentary on books having to do with time management, creativity, and personal productivity
• Reviews on software and hardware that may help you manage your life (this will be Mac-Centric), especially software and tips that help with project polishing and residue
• Posts about developing yourself as a teacher and as a learner
• Tricks and best practices to help you heal the administrative pains that ail you

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