When I was in graduate school, some of my course decisions were strategic and planful. I took required courses in statistics and developmental psychology of course. I was designing a career researching adolescence, so I tracked down a course on adolescent development in another department because psychology didn’t offer it. I took Structural Equation Modeling from Peter Bentler as he beta tested – on us – a new version of his program, EQS. (Side note: I won a free copy of EQS for finding the most bugs in it. Imagine doing your Stats homework with a bug-filled program that keeps crashing when you try to run something). I took Learning and Memory because Bob Bjork was supposed to be fabulous at teaching learning and memory. Some of my choices were less admirable. I took regression in another department because I heard that the psych regression instructor was too hard (well, that is strategic and planful…). I avoided psychoneuroimmunology because even the name scared me (I regret this decision now!).

The problem I see with many of our graduate students is that they approach choosing graduate courses the way they chose undergraduate courses. They act as though the department has very specific expectations of courses they need to take, and they try to fill each category based on what is offered. Please don’t do this.

Our graduate program requires a 4 course methods sequence in the first 2 years. We require 3 substantive courses in the first year (Individual, Family, and Prevention). We require an additional 2 methods courses and 4 substantive courses. Each of our 4 areas recommends what courses to take to specialize in that area (e.g., the family area recommends a micro course and a macro course). However, these are RECOMMENDED and are not required.

After you’ve fulfilled the program’s required courses, choose your remaining courses based on what you need to get the job you want, and to succeed in it. Stop trying to check off lists and focus on your needs. Will someone at candidacy say, but she didn’t take 506? Maybe. Convince him why the courses you took are more valuable for what you want to do.

Last year, as Undergraduate Professor-in-Charge, I worked with Kate Hynes on redesigning the HDFS undergraduate website to better help students plan for future careers. HDFS undergraduate students have many more course requirements than graduate students, but they also can choose courses to meet particular requirements based on their interests. We redesigned the website so that they could choose a career path of interest, and as part of that planning, choose courses that would help them develop the knowledge and skills to get there.

I am not writing those kinds of details for you. But you can use these guidelines to sort it out:

1. What statistics and methodology will you need to address the types of research questions you want to answer? Yes, you should think about the analyses you want to do in your master’s thesis. And your dissertation. But more broadly, what career skills will you need? It’s much easier to take a statistics course as a graduate student than as a professor (trust me on this one!). Are you interested in peer relationships? Find a network analysis course. Working with longitudinal data? Make sure you take courses to give you the tools to work with these data. Ask your adviser or other faculty what methodological tools they think you specifically need to do your research, but also ask them what methodological tools they think are the up and coming ones. Or better yet, ask your methods professors.


2. Figure out what content areas you need to understand, and take courses in them. What topics do you want to research? What stage of development? Obviously, if you’re studying a particular stage of development, you should take a course in that stage. If you are studying families, you should take family courses. But more generally, think about your specific interests, and find courses to fit them.

3. Think about the instructors you will have. In our department, we have many award-winning, internationally-recognized scholars. Take a course from someone amazing, even if the course content doesn’t perfectly line up with your career goals, just so that you can take a course with someone amazing.

4. Are you planning a teaching career? What courses will you be expected to teach? Some of our graduates teach in human development and family studies departments, but many teach in psychology and sociology departments, or at medical schools. What courses might you be expected to teach there? If psychology, it’s likely you’ll teach developmental psychology, but will you be expected to teach something in another area? What course could prepare you? If sociology, will you be the family expert? Make sure you have training in the kinds of courses you might teach.  If you can’t get the right graduate level training, then make sure you TA the kinds of courses you might teach.

5. Are there areas where you should have academic fluency, even if you never plan to do research in those areas? For instance, I would urge anyone who plans to study individual development in any part of the lifespan to take at least one neuroscience course. You may have no interest in being a neuroscientist, or in even using neuroscience measures. However, given where the field is going, you will be expected to understand neuroscience – when you review manuscripts, when you review grant proposals, when you talk to colleagues, and perhaps, when you collaborate with a neuroscientist to collect spit samples or fMRI data so that you can get your work funded. What fluency do you need to be a successful scientist in your chosen field?

6. Look at course syllabi. Sometimes, you can’t base your decision solely on the bulletin description. Different instructors teach the course with different foci. When you’re choosing a course, find the syllabus from the last time that instructor taught it, and see if it matches your needs/interests. If necessary, email the instructor and ask for a prior syllabus or a brief description. Just don’t ask him to send his syllabus for an upcoming course – it’s unlikely it’s written 2 months beforehand, but it is likely you’ll annoy him by asking.

7. Ask other graduate students what courses they loved. Ask your adviser what courses, or what instructors, you should take. Word of mouth is useful.

8. Want a course on a particular topic, but don’t know where it’s offered? Search for it in one of these ways:

a. If you’re considering a specific semester, look at course schedules in other departments. Areas could include psychology, sociology, biobehavioral health, statistics, communication arts and sciences. See what courses they are offering and if they meet your needs.

b. Go to the graduate bulletin and search for courses by a key word. This process can be a bit clunky, but if you’re interested in a particular topic, can be fruitful. If I search for “qualitative” I find qualitative methods courses in EDTHP, HI ED, CAS, IST, APLNG, CRIMJ, ADTED, RPTM, CI, MGMT, NURS, COMM. I can then use the course scheduling list to see if one is offered next semester.  

9.  Don’t take courses just to fill a spot on your schedule. If you really can’t find something that meets your needs next semester, then take some independent study credits and work on your thesis, or write a manuscript and get it out for publication. Doing so will serve your future career much better than taking a course as filler.

“The post How to choose your graduate courses first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 22, 2013.”

As I said, information presented at the beginning and the end is more easily remembered (the primacy and recency effects). Just as you want to put effort into crafting your first sentence, you also want to carefully craft your final paragraph.

Common mistake #1: Writers often try to summarize every single finding in their final paragraph. This attempt results in a clunky concluding paragraph, that doesn’t highlight the most interesting/significant findings (it’s not possible that everything you found is equally exciting/novel, is it?), and doesn’t direct the reader’s attention appropriately.

Common mistake #2: Writers write very vague sentences that don’t really summarize anything specific reported in that particular paper (e.g., we found gender differences in sexual risk behavior).

Common mistake #3: Writers treat their findings as so revolutionary that all future research, interventions, and policy will be influenced by the findings in this one study of 100 students from one middle school (e.g., findings demonstrate that parents should avoid discussing alcohol with their middle school aged children, and that future interventions should train parents how to dictate complete abstinence from drinking in order to prevent their children from becoming early alcohol abusers).

Common mistake #4: Writers end with their limitations or future directions paragraph, rather than adding a concluding paragraph afterward. You want to include these topics in your discussion. But you don’t want to leave the readers thinking about the things you did wrong or what others should do, you want them remembering what you did. 

What should you do?

1. Summarize 1-3 specific and interesting findings that add to past research.  Think about your elevator speech. If someone asked you to tell them in a couple of sentences your most interesting findings from this paper, what would you say? Write that.

2. Be clear on the how these findings contribute to the literature – do they support or refute a prior theory? Do they have important public health implications? Do they show something novel about human behavior?

That’s it. Relatively short, clear, and memorable. Here are a few examples:

From a short article in an AMA-style journal:

“Our data suggest that the potential acceptability of the HPV vaccine is high in Argentina, given that there is acceptance among the professional community, that physicians recommend it, and that the vaccine is affordable. Special educational efforts must be undertaken to assure that physicians provide parents and women adequate, evidence-based information about the HPV vaccine.” (from Arrossi, Maceira, Paolino, & Sankaranarayanan, 2012).

A public health message:

“In conclusion, this research supported the notion that students consuming alcohol with a celebration mission reach higher levels of intoxication, thereby putting themselves at substantial risk for alcohol-related problems, including DUI. Interventions to prevent alcohol abuse on a college or university campus need to consider the impact of various celebrations. Perhaps it is possible to develop and promote alternative ways for college students to commemorate special occasions.” (from Glindemann, Wiegand, & Geller, 2007)

A developmental perspective:

“Patterning of risk behavior from late adolescence to almost 30 years of age differed depending on the type of behavior. Most risk behaviors decrease from late adolescence to young adulthood, but the age when decline begins differs. While drinking up to the point of drunkenness, smoking, cannabis use, and deviance decline during young adulthood, HIV-related sexual risk behavior still increases. This might indicate a distinct functionality compared with other risk behaviors.” (from Brodbeck, Bachmann, Croudace, & Brown, 2013)

A policy perspective:

“Beyond these limitations, however, results highlight the importance of considering housing in a multifaceted manner in order to address the underlying connections between multiple aspects of housing contexts. By assessing housing quality, stability, type, and cost in one comprehensive model, this study sought to delineate the relative contributions of these interrelated aspects of housing to children’s developmental trajectories in emotional, behavioral, and cognitive realms. Results underscore the central role of poor housing quality as potentially the most potent aspect of housing in inhibiting the healthy development of low-income children and youth, with housing problems showing the most consistent links with children’s and adolescents’ emotional and behavioral functioning, as well as with adolescents’ cognitive skills.” (from Coley, Leventhal, Lynch, & Kull, 2013)

I think that’s what I have to say about intentional writing for now. What other professional development topics would you like to see covered in the coming weeks?

“The post Intentional writing part 6: Leave them with something to remember first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 20, 2013.”

My Ph.D. is in developmental psychology from UCLA, where we were required to take psychology courses from outside our area, and to choose a minor from another area. I had zero interests in cognitive psychology. But at my friend’s insistence that it would be good, I took a course in learning and memory from Bob Bjork. That class influenced me more than any other non-developmental course I took during undergrad or grad (except intro psych freshman year). I don’t remember everything from that course, but a few things have stuck with me, including:

• Retrieval is a potent learning event
  
• Memory regresses to the mean
• First and last things in a sequence are more easily remembered than the middle

I took the course about 20 years ago, so it’s possible some of these points have subsequently been disproven. But, I draw on this memory research when teaching, learning, and writing. In particular, I know that in a lecture, talk, grant proposal, or paper, people are going to remember the beginning and end more than the middle. That doesn’t mean that you should fill the middle with junk, but it does mean that you should pay particular attention to the first sentence and last paragraph of your paper.

Your first sentence (and title, and abstract) is like an advertisement – step right up! Read this great paper and learn exciting new things! You want to convince the reader that your paper will: (1) be clearly written; (2) be interesting; (3) present something important and worth the time to read. That’s a lot of pressure on a first sentence. But you should spend more time on the first sentence than any other sentence in the paper. Write a first sentence that will make people want to read more.

The most common weak 1st sentences I read are either (1) So vague that they really don’t say anything, or (2) a dull fact that may be more specific, but still doesn’t say what the paper will be about, or why I should bother reading it. The examples below are all slightly adapted from real theses or published manuscripts:

• Vague example: Emerging adulthood, the period of development between adolescence and adulthood, includes intensive identity exploration (Arnett, 2000).
• Boring example: By ages 20-24 years, 85% of women and 82% of men have had sex in their lifetime (National Health Statistics Reports, 2011). 
• Example of both: Many studies have examined risky sexual behavior among college students (LOTS OF CITES).

These are points you may want to make somewhere in your paper. And, there is nothing grammatically or stylistically incorrect about these sentences. You are likely to even get published with them. But they won’t attract your readers from the start. Recently, I wanted to give my student examples of strong first sentences. We are working on a manuscript together, and have a shared folder of articles, so I decided to browse first sentences to point out good examples to her. I was surprised to discover that the vast majority of publications in this folder on associations between alcohol use and sexual behavior had first sentences that were virtually interchangeable with each other. They almost all started with a fact about how drinking in college is dangerous; how drinking and sex are associated; or how STI’s are elevated during adolescence and young adulthood. In some instances, these facts might work for the start of a paper, but in the majority, they were relatively dull and interchangeable.

So, how should you start you start your paper?  Possibilities include:

• A question relevant to your research questions: Does fraternity involvement increase the risk of unprotected sex after alcohol consumption?
• An interesting or surprising fact related to your ideas:  Historically, fellatio or cunnilingus, hereto referred to as oral sex, were perceived among heterosexual couples as not only more intimate than intercourse but also to be reserved for those who were married (Michael, Gagnon, Laumann, & Kolata, 1994). (from Chambers, 2007)
• A theoretical/conceptual question: Alcohol use among young people tends to lead to impaired decision making and risky behavior (Kaly, Heesacker, & Frost,, 2002; MacDonald, MacDonald, Zanna, & Fong, 2000; Steele & Josephs, 1990), but adolescents and young adults themselves perceive the outcomes of alcohol use to generally be positive (Lee, Maggs, Neighbors, & Patrick, 2011; Patrick & Maggs, 2011).
• Hammer at the public health significance, if you have something beyond the fact that everyone else uses: Hospital emergency departments (ED) remain a healthcare safety net for much of the inner-city ED population.1 (from Bazargan-Hejazi et al., 2012).
• A cultural observation relevant to your paper: From “Animal House” to “American Pie,” late adolescents and young adults (usually college students) are portrayed as talking about sex in the rare moments that they are not having sex or trying to have sex. (from Lefkowitz, Boone, & Shearer, 2004).
• The same facts that everyone else is saying, but say it well: Alcohol use is widely understood to be a common part of the collegiate experience (Schulenberg & Maggs, 2002; Straus & Bacon, 1953) based on a strong cultural expectation that drinking is central to the experience of the mythically carefree college years (Maggs, 1997). (from Patrick & Maggs, 2009).

With permission, here are a couple of examples of two of my current students’ early tries at a first sentence to their thesis, and the revised version:

• RW, early version: Although many adolescents and young adults engage in sexual behavior, their experiences are not uniform.
• RW, revised:  Adolescent sexual behaviors and partnerships are important from developmental and risk-taking perspectives because the timing, sequencing, context, and patterning of sexual behaviors correspond to psychological and sexual health outcomes later in life (Haydon, Herring, Prinstein & Halpern, 2012; Sandfort, Orr, Hirsch, & Santelli, 2008). 
• EW, early version: There is growing evidence that the effects of parenting may have implications well into emerging adulthood (Abar, Carter, & Winsler, 2009; Weiss & Schwarz, 1996).
• EW, revised: There is growing evidence that the effects of parenting may have implications for individuals’ study skills, GPA, and alcohol consumption well into emerging adulthood (Abar, Carter, & Winsler, 2009; Turner, Chandler, & Heffer 2009; Weiss & Schwarz, 1996).

Notice that in both instances, they have added more specifics, and are setting the reader up to understand the details of their own papers.

Don’t worry about writing this fabulous first sentence when you first start the paper. Write something as a placeholder, and come back to it after much of the rest of the paper is written.

I seem to have said enough about first sentences to warrant postponing a discussion of concluding paragraphs for a separate post.  I’ll leave you with some of my favorite fiction introductory sentences, copied from American Book Review. Notice how they really make you want to read the next sentence.

• Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)
• If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
• I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
• In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
• High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

“The post Intentional writing part 5: Start and end strong first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 18, 2013.”

When I gave a draft of my master’s thesis to Terry Au, my second reader, she returned it covered in red marks and with the oral comment “I marked these errors once; I don’t expect to find any of these mistakes again.” There is risk in having someone who studies child language development on your committee. I guarantee I made those mistakes again. But the marks that may have influenced my writing the most were the big red circles around my dangling “this”s.

Technically, it is not grammatically incorrect to use “this” without a noun after it. “This” can be used either as a demonstrative determiner, and therefore modify a noun as an adjective would, or a demonstrative pronoun, and stand alone (yes, I am citing Wikipedia here; don’t try it at home). “This” as a pronoun works fine when you and someone else are standing in front of something, as in, “this is mine!” while pointing at a cupcake your partner is about to grab. But the majority of the time, if you use it as a pronoun in your writing, it will be vague and you will leave the reader with uncertainty about what you mean.

I see this most frequently (see what I did there? Not so clear, is it? I’ll start over).

I see this misuse most frequently at the start of sentences, referring to something in the prior sentence, such as “This demonstrates” or “This provides evidence that” or “This involves” or “This indicates.” Often, a simple addition of a noun will make the sentence much clearer, such as “This finding,” “This study,” or “This association.”

Here’s an example:

“Furthermore, by college graduation, about 90% of students report having penetrative vaginal intercourse (Patrick & Lee, 2010; Fryar, Hirsch, Porter, Kottiri, Brody, & Louis, 2007). This indicates that the college years are pivotal for the development of sexual behaviors.” 

As a reader, I can kind of figure out that the author is referring to basically the full point in the prior sentence with the word “this.” But much clearer to state, “This percentage indicates” or “This high rate of sexual behavior indicates,” so the reader doesn’t have to sort it out himself.

Another common use I see is “Because of this.” An example:

In the current study, we used adolescent self-reports during school based data collection to examine associations between attachment to parents and externalizing behaviors. Because of this, our findings may be biased.”

Because of what? The fact that it was self-reports? School-based? The constructs assessed? Be specific.

Here’s another example:

“Students frequently described alcohol use as leading to arousal, often described in terms of an increase in horniness or a decrease in inhibition as a result of drinking alcohol. This is supported by the literature, which describes alcohol as a social lubricant that increases disinhibition (MacDonald et al., 2000).”

What is supported by the literature? If I change it to “this link between alcohol use and arousal” it becomes a bit clearer. 

Again, it’s about being intentional in your writing. If you tell the reader exactly what you mean, the reader will know exactly what you mean, and won’t have to guess.


I really could go on and on, because this [issue] is one of the most frequent ones I encounter, particularly in grading. But this [post] needs to end at some point. 

When I’m providing my students feedback in track changes, I sometimes catch myself using “this” as a pronoun, as in “this is unclear” or “this is awkward.” This [instance] is not actually vague, because I’ve highlighted a portion of text, the track changes equivalent of pointing. Still, I try my best to model and sometimes change it to “this sentence/phrase” or “this point.”

You know that everything I just wrote replies to “these” too, right? And while you’re at it, check your vague use of “it” as well.

“The post Intentional writing part 4: Dis the this first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 14, 2013."

In October, I gave a talk at Brandeis University, my alma mater. The audience included 3 professors I had taken courses from as an undergraduate student in the 80’s. A week later over lunch, I learned from one of them that the prior week’s speaker was a psychology professor who covered “How to give a bad research talk.” They didn’t tell me about it beforehand, because they thought it might make me anxious. And thank goodness – I could just imagine that with that knowledge, every time one student leaned over to another to whisper something, or shot someone a look, I’d be thinking, “what bad talk thing did I just do?”

Blogging about writing this past week, I’ve become more self-conscious of my own writing. As apparently have my current grad students, one of whom wrote this week and said: “Each of us in the lab thinks that we alone must have inspired your comments.” So yes, each of my current students have broken some of the guidelines I’ve discussed, but so have all of my former students, my colleagues, and every student whose paper I have ever graded.

And so have I. Despite my increased self-consciousness, I emailed a manuscript draft to a current student just as I was publishing blog posts about writing. The student, a co-author on the manuscript, sent it back with many comments, including many inconsistencies in my construct terminology. I had definitely checked my own work, though clearly not enough times. Although we all want to send our very best work out every time we hit “send,” better for a co-author to find problems than a reviewer. So, please read these posts while keeping a little song in the back of your head – one I always sing to my kids in times of frustration over lack of perfection. 

Working on my own work while writing about intentional writing also has made me aware of exceptions to some of my guidelines. So do recognize that I’m not saying you have to follow each of these guidelines in every single sentence – sometimes there are stylistic, argument-relevant, parsimony, or wording reasons to deviate from these rules. But do so intentionally.

Today I want to discuss vague writing. I caught a couple of instances in my own writing this week, for instance, something like:

“College students who drink alcohol more tend to engage in more sexual behavior.”

Huh? “Drink alcohol more” isn’t ideal, because it’s not totally clear what I mean. More frequently, or more servings of alcohol? However, I could argue that if I meant more servings, I would write “drink more alcohol” so maybe I can let it slide. However, “engage in more sexual behavior” is quite vague. What kind of sexual behavior? Vaginal? Oral? Kissing? What does “more” mean? More frequently? More partners? More frequently with the same partner or more frequently with different partners? No way to know.

When you write with intention, you should be certain that your sentences convey exactly what you mean. If you write something vague, the reader may interpret it differently from your intention, leading to confusion.

Here are some examples of the types of vague statements I frequently encounter, and how to improve them:

• Researchers have studied parent-adolescent communication in a number of different ways.
•         What ways?
•         Better: Researchers have studied parent-adolescent communication using adolescent self-report, parent self-report, and, less frequently, naturalistic or lab-based observations of parents and adolescents.

• Time spent with deviant peers is associated with a number of different outcomes.
•         Even if you’re about to describe those outcomes, try to be more specific in your intro sentence – negative outcomes (still pretty vague)? Psychological or behavioral outcomes? Both? More description in the sentence that leads the paragraph will frame the rest of the paragraph, making it easier to read, because the reader knows what to expect.
•         Better: Time spent with deviant peers is associated with negative psychological, behavioral, and social outcomes during adolescence.

• Research suggests that romantic relationships have important implications for adolescents.
•         What aspects of romantic relationships? What implications?
•         Better: Research suggests that romantic relationship quality during adolescence has implications for mental health, attachment orientation, and romantic relationship quality in adulthood.

• Our sample included only college students from one university. Future research should address this issue.
•         Okay. But why? How?
•         Better: Future studies should consider asking similar questions among students at universities in different geographic regions, 2-year colleges, private universities, online universities, non-residential students, as well as among individuals who are not attending college.  For instance, perceived alcohol-sex links may be less positive and more negative among students at campuses with more conservative attitudes toward alcohol use and/or sex, such as religiously sponsored universities.

• This work will make an important contribution to the literature.
•         Everyone thinks their work will make an important contribution to the literature. Tell us why.
•         Better: This paper makes an important contribution to the literature, by examining HIV testing in a high risk but understudied population, and by including longitudinal data to predict HIV testing from attitudes and behaviors in earlier adolescence.

By using more specific language, readers will know exactly what you plan to do, how, and why. Once again, making it easier to follow your paper, and ending with an overall sense of what you did, how, and why.

“The post Intentional writing part 3: Vanquish the vague first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 12, 2013.”

I’ll start with a confession. As the mother of twins, I worry about fairness and favoritism. This concern comes out in peculiar ways – for instance, on our family blog, I try to alternate across posts which kid’s name appears first. And, in the 100+ holiday cards I write every year, I aim to sign about half with my son’s name first, and about half with my daughter’s name first.

Much of the time in social scientific writing, we have a list of 2 or more things that repeatedly appears (and you won’t vary those terms, because you read my last post). Elementary and middle school students. Mothers and fathers. Alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use. Reading, writing, and mathematics. You do not have to worry about favoritism for mothers vs. fathers. Pick an order, and use it every single time. This strategy will make your writing easier to follow. Use it consistently throughout the paper:

1.      Every time you write the items as a list (alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana), use the same order.

2.      In the introduction, when you have sections or paragraphs about each item in the list (e.g., a paragraph about alcohol, one about tobacco, and one about marijuana), use the same order as appears in your list.

3.      In the methods section when you describe each measure, use the same order.

4.      In the results section when you describe your findings, use the same order.

5.      In your tables, when you enter them as predictors, use the same order.

Readers will get used to that order, and so reading the items consistently in the same order will require less work/processing than if the order continually changes. Now your reader can concentrate on your methods and important findings, rather than trying to parse your writing. Sometimes in the discussion it does make sense to switch things up – here you are trying to make new connections and draw new conclusions, and so a twisting of order, especially if you’ve been consistent so far, could actually make the reader more attentive to a new idea.  For instance, if findings for alcohol and marijuana were similar, but findings for tobacco were different, you may want to write about alcohol and marijuana in one paragraph, and tobacco in the next.

A related and equally, or perhaps even more important, issue.

Often we write about associations between two variables; much of the time, the whole point of the paper is how group of constructs X is associated with group of constructs Y. Much of the time, we have a theoretical or conceptual idea about the causal direction or temporal ordering of this association – though we can rarely prove it. To make your writing clear, always present one set of constructs first in writing about these associations. For instance, let’s say you’re interested in how self-esteem might lead to better academic engagement and achievement (again, you conceptualize the temporal ordering that way, even if you cannot definitively test it). Here are two examples of how to summarize some past (fictional, and thus uncited) work.

HARD TO FOLLOW:

Adolescents’ SAT scores are associated with their self-esteem assessed in the same grade. In addition, adolescents’ self-esteem during high school is associated with their subsequent math grades during their first year of college.

EASIER TO FOLLOW:

Adolescents’ self-esteem in junior year is associated with their SAT scores taken the same year. In addition, self-esteem during high school is associated with adolescents’ subsequent math grades during their first year of college.

Notice the difference? In the first sentence you have to do some mental gymnastics to recognize that the meaningful distinction between the two sentences is SAT scores vs. math grades. In the second sentence, the writer, by using parallel structure, has done the work for you, and the distinction is clearer. 

Consistent ordering is another writing improvement that is relatively easy to fix in your own work. Pick an order and try to use it consistently. Also, when your draft is complete, read it through one time specifically looking for deviations from this ordering. Your readers will thank you.  And understand you.

"The post Intentional writing part 2: Consistent wording avoids confusion first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz's Blog on November 8, 2013"

  In high school English class you learn that repetition is evil. You shouldn’t write “the girl” every time. You should vary between “the girl” and “the young woman” and “Juliet” and “Lord Capulet’s daughter.” To avoid writing “beautiful” repeatedly, you will pull out your thesaurus (dating myself – I mean open google) and use words like attractive, alluring, and pretty.

That works if you’re writing an essay about the theme of lightness and dark in Romeo and Juliet. But it does not work for (social) scientific writing.

Okay, there are exceptions. Even in scientific writing, you should not start every sentence with “however” or use “the authors examined” in every other sentence. But, you should not vary between the terms “girl” and “young woman” and “female child” if you are writing about the same person or category of persons.  

Think about writing in the biological or medical sciences. Let’s say you’re writing a paper about the properties of human papillomavirus (HPV). You would not want to vary the terms you use in place of HPV, or else you would get a paragraph like this:

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012). The virus that causes cervical cancer is highest among women aged 20 to 24 years (Dunne et al., 2007), an age range when many young Americans attend college. The most common sexually transmitted disease is spread through genital skin-to-skin contact during sexual activity (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012).

Instead, you would want to use “HPV” each and every time you were referring to HPV, to avoid confusion:

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012). HPV infection is highest among women aged 20 to 24 years (Dunne et al., 2007), an age range when many young Americans attend college. HPV is spread through genital skin-to-skin contact during sexual activity (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012).

Is the second one amazingly eloquent? No. Is it clear? Yes.

Similarly, when you vary the term you use for a group of people or for a construct, you confuse the reader. If you write about “girls” in one sentence and “young women” in the next, the reader might wonder if you’re describing two different age groups. If you write about peer relationships in one sentence and peer interactions in the next, readers might think you are trying to distinguish these constructs.

Whenever I edit my own work, I read through thinking about what terminology I’m using to describe groups and constructs. I make sure to pick a specific term for each group/construct, and then I do a search for all uses of the terms I didn’t pick. That doesn’t mean that I can never use the other terms, but I want to make sure I’m using my terminology with intention. It’s obviously better to make these choices before writing, and I do try to do that, but sometimes other terms slip in, or there’s a reason to change the terms I use.

Here are a few examples of groupings of terms that I have recently seen used interchangeably, in my own writing or in others’, which has led to confusion or lack of clarity:

·         Well being/mental health/psychological well being

·         Sexual behavior/sexual behaviors/sexual experiences/penetrative sex/vaginal sex/sexual activity/sexual encounters

·         Young adults/emerging adults/ late adolescents/young people/youth

·         Motives/motivations

·         Wave 2/2nd Wave/Time 2

It’s confusing because as a reader, it’s not clear if the writer conceptualizes young adulthood as a separate phase from emerging adulthood. It’s not clear if the author considers mental health and well being to be interchangeable or distinct constructs. By the way, writing this sentence, I first wrote “distinct” twice, thought it was too repetitive, and changed one to separate. There, repetition is unnecessary.

A good way to improve your ability to be consistent in terminology is to edit other people’s work. We tend to notice inconsistency in others’ work more than in our own, because in our own writing, our intentions are clear to ourselves. When we read someone else’s work, difficulty with following terminology becomes more apparent.

“The post Intentional writing part 1: Use consistent terms  first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s Blog on November 6, 2013.”

Some early advice from my adviser, Marian Sigman, has stuck with me perhaps more than any other advice. I’ll try to share it here in as close to her words as possible:

When you submit a grant proposal (or a manuscript, or a dissertation) and you imagine a reviewer reading it, you picture her sitting at an uncluttered desk with no distractions, full attention to your masterpiece.

In reality, she is more likely to be sitting on her bed, pages of her manuscript strewn about, with children jumping on the bed and a dog trying to eat the pages. Real life is messy.  As a result, you need to do everything in your power to make your writing clear, easily digestible, and as error free as possible. You can’t control the environment it will be read in, but you can control how easy it is to read it.  

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Perhaps these words have stayed with me more than any other because I read manuscripts, grant proposals, and theses whenever and wherever I can. Yes, in bed with children climbing me, but also on trains, in the car during the kids’ ceramics class (actually, a very low distraction environment), in coffee shops, in doctors’ offices waiting to be seen, on park benches at playgrounds… whenever and wherever I can fit in a few minutes.  I rarely read a full document of more than a few pages in one sitting, and if I do, it’s after midnight. Clarity is incredibly important when you’re trying to convey your message to someone who is distracted or exhausted.

So for my next few posts, I’m going to discuss some ways to make your writing clearer.  I call it intentional writing because it involves carefully considering your word choice, and thinking not only about the content of your work, but the words you use to convey it. As with posters and presentations, good content only works if backed up by clear presentation. Once you start writing with intention, it will become more natural to correct your own writing, as well as to edit others’.

Other entries in this series:
Use consistent terms
Consistent ordering avoids confusion
Vanquish the vague
Dis the this
Start strong
Leave them with something to remember
Write about what you are doing, not what others are not
Integrate, don't list past research
Great introductory sentences
Findings-focused literature summaries


“The post Intentional writing  first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s Blog on November 4, 2013.”