Recently I discussed how I work with students to easily follow the edits they make between drafts. Today I wanted to write about how to provide students feedback in Word in ways that will provide them with scaffolding around writing.
 
In my first year of grad school, I handed my second reader a copy of my masters thesis proposal. About a week later, she returned it to me covered in red ink. She said, that’s the last time I expect you to make any of those mistakes. I’m certain I didn’t magically drop all of those errors in future writing, but I did pay close attention to every word she circled and marked up to figure out what I had done wrong, and to get a sense of how to write better the next time.
 
When I started as faculty I always handed students drafts in hard copy. Usually we would sit together and go through my comments, page by page. I even had a list of editing shorthand that I used, things like AWK for awkward and TS for tense switching.
 
Now I almost always email students a copy of their paper as a Word document with track changes and comments. I have mixed feelings, however, about simply correcting things in track changes. You know how you grade students’ exams, spending substantial time explaining where you deducted points and why? And when you hand them back you realize they are just looking at the grade on the last page? Well, with student theses and manuscripts, I am concerned that sometimes, some students simply accept all of the changes without actually going through and seeing what the suggested changes are, or trying to figure out why I wanted to change it.
 
So, depending on the student and where in the editing process we are, I may handle this process differently. If we are early in our time working together, I try to mark things carefully and write a lot of comments explaining what I think needs to be done. If there are errors that happen frequently, I may correct it the first few times it happens with a note, and I may even write “I stopped correcting these errors after this one. I marked some of them, but you should reread the whole paper carefully for more instances of it.” After that, I either just write a comment (e.g., tense switching) or simply highlight it for them to figure out what the issue is.
 
Similarly, if there is a lot of awkward phrasing, I may rewrite a couple of early ones as examples, and then just start marking awkward phrases/sentences. Or if, for instance, the student is reporting on 10 betas in a regression, and they are all written unclearly, I may rewrite the first one, and tell the student to rewrite the remainder using the one I rewrote as a model.
 
If we’ve been working together for a while, and the student makes an error that I know she commonly makes and I’ve corrected on prior papers (or drafts of this paper), I likely will comment on the first one, explaining it’s another instance of error X that we’ve talked about before.
 
There are times that I don’t use editing as a teaching moment. If, for instance, the student has defended her dissertation (and thus isn’t a student anymore!) and we are trying to get it published, I may spend more time editing the text outright and less time explaining or asking the student to fix things herself. At that point I’m an author of the document as well, so I’m more comfortable with inserting my own writing.
 
Good, clear writing is such a critical skill in academia. We as mentors have to make sure that, no matter what medium we use, we do not treat the editing of student work as if we were a book editor “fixing” things for someone else. Instead, it’s essential that we use this opportunity to teach students how to be better writers.
 
“Giving Students Feedback in Track Changes While Still Teaching Them to Write first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 14, 2018.”

In Fall 2016, my family had just moved to a new state, and I was a first time department head in a new department. I was busy. But on top of all that, I had three students at my former institution all trying to complete their dissertations by Summer 2017 so that they could graduate with me as their committee chair.
 
All three students had their dissertation proposal meetings during a 3-day period in November. That October was… intense. There were many nights where I didn’t get to the dissertation drafts until about midnight, and I often stayed up until 2:00 or 3:00 AM editing, sometimes from a standing position so that I didn’t fall asleep. I occasionally took breaks to do down dog, again, so I didn’t fall asleep.
 
[I believe it’s important to interject at this point that I adore all three of these students; they all DID finish by Summer 2017, so 4 years for PhD or 5 years for combined masters/PhD; and they all now have awesome positions as assistant professor or post  doc ]
 
Part of the issue was a problem of perspective. I have a general rule that students can expect a one-week turnaround. To each student, they were sending me drafts at a reasonable rate for my response. But, that rate ignored the two other doctoral students; former students sending me co-authored manuscripts; manuscripts to review for journals; my own writing; and of course, every other aspect of my job, and my life.
 
I know I’m not unique in this situation. Part of being faculty is always having to balance one’s own writing, teaching, and service, with editing students’ and collaborators’ work and reviewing grants and manuscripts for external sources.
 
After we got through the defenses, I decided there had to be a better way. So, my students and I came up with a system to get through Spring semester and their dissertations. And the system worked so well, that I have continued the system and use it for the large category of research that I mentally refer to as “other people’s work” even though, of course, I’m often a co-author. I really think it has revolutionized my ability to get other’ people’s work back to them in a timely manner (I’m human though; I definitely slip up.).
 
What did we do? We created a google spreadsheet to account for my time. Here’s a screenshot that I took this past November, a few months after everyone had graduated:

Yes, I have very productive former students!
 
We created the spreadsheet based on my expectations of how much other people’s work I could handle in a given week. I decided that in any given week I could handle 2 manuscript-length editing projects, and 2 smaller editing projects. Recognizing sometimes I needed to do more, I added the “#3 if desperate” column. And, during that dissertation writing semester, we had to add the “super desperation” column, though fortunately we don’t use it much. I also look a few months ahead and black out cells – Thanksgiving week I cut back on the number of things I would edit by blacking out some cells. Spring break I did the same. I blacked out the whole week of our family August vacation.
 
I also defined for students what category they should use:

• Manuscript: manuscript (co-author or review for journal); chapter of a dissertation or dissertation proposal (if sending multiple chapters, counts as multiple manuscripts); masters or honors thesis; external tenure review letter; dissertation if I’m not the chair
• Lower-level editing task: conference abstracts; conference poster or talk drafts; job talk slides; job talk materials; up to 10 reference letters to write for set of similar jobs (if applying to 2 different types, e.g., faculty & post docs, count as 2 separate ones); looking at/going over analyses before writing up

 
Students all have access to the editing calendar for months ahead, so they can get on my calendar. This system was extremely helpful during the crazy-dissertation writing semester, when everyone had similar deadlines, and we had to figure out a way to make it all fit, so that I wasn’t reading everything in the same week. It also helped students stick to their deadlines, because they knew if they didn’t get something to me as planned, it might be four weeks later when they could get back on my calendar. I think it also provides students with insight as to what it’s like to be a professor, because they get a better sense of the big picture of what my time use is in terms of other people’s work. In addition to students being able to add their own work into the calendar, I will add things myself, such as manuscript reviews for journals, co-authored papers not by students, and external tenure reviews. 
 
I also have other expectations/assumptions, such as:

• Assume I am likely to edit any proposal, thesis, dissertation, or manuscript a minimum of 3 times, often more
• Only use “if desperate” column if truly desperate (e.g., external deadline). Otherwise, use a subsequent week
• I prefer not to read the same thing 2 weeks in a row, so with multiple rounds of edits on same document, make sure there’s a week off between when I receive them.

 
I know this system is unlikely to work for everyone. It doesn’t always work for me. Sometimes, unexpected things come up and I get a couple of weeks behind (a couple of times I’ve cried uncle and moved everything forward a couple of weeks). Other times I am just really tired and get behind because, for instance, everyone in my life is sick and I want to get enough sleep to try to have a halfway decent immune system. Sometimes, a student misses a deadline and she has to get someone else to swap with her. All that said, in my various administrative roles, I’ve talked to students about mentors who take many weeks and even sometimes months to provide feedback on writing, often slowing down students’ progress through the program or marketability for jobs. This system helps me to stay relatively on track with editing other people’s work, but also, not to let it take over my life. I like that when I get asked to review a manuscript I can look at the spreadsheet and see if I have a slot open in the next 4 weeks; if not, I turn it down. I like that on Sunday night I can look at my week ahead and know what my other people’s work tasks are. It works well enough for me that I wanted to share it with you. If you have a system that works well for you, please feel free to share it in the comments.
 
 “The post How I gained control of my editing tasks first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on May 25, 2018.”

I’m feeling particularly sensitive to hyperbole after days of listening to reports of snowmageddon/snowpocalypse, and also worry about the 18 students trying to fly/drive/bus to our prospective graduate weekend right now. In addition, there is a food blog I enjoy reading, but I’ve discovered over time that each of her posts is so hyperbolic, it is difficult to take her recommendation seriously. Every recipe she provides is the most delicious/amazing/it-will-change-your-life recipe. Now when she posts a new recipe, my enthusiasm is dampened, because they can’t ALL be the best way ever known to prepare chicken.

That said, I do think that if you are not already writing introductions the way I’m about to describe, it may actually change your life.

There is a tendency when writing an introduction to write about past research in a list. I see it in undergraduate papers, master’s theses, dissertations, manuscripts I review, and yes, published articles. It is not necessarily incorrect, nor is it terrible writing. However, it is another area where you can move to intentional writing, working harder as the author to make the reading easier for others. It is easier to write a list of past research, but it is easier to read a summary of past work that integrates across studies. Undergraduate students are more likely to have one paragraph or so per study, and writers with more experience tend to have a sentence or so per study. The sentences are often linked with phrases like “similarly,” “in contrast,” or “other work has also found.” But nevertheless, the writer leaves the work of drawing connections to the reader. When a writer does the integrative work for the reader, the reader can quickly arrive at the big picture of past work, and see how it relates to the authors’ own ideas.

Here’s an example. In this paper, I could list past work as follows:

College students are more likely to drink, and drink more heavily, on their 21st birthday compared to other days (Smith, Bogle, Talbott, Grant, & Castillo, 2006). Rutledge, Park, and Sher (2008), in a more representative study, found similar increases in drinking on 21st birthdays. Neal and Fromme (2007) found that alcohol use was elevated on holidays like New Year’s Eve, as well as on football weekends. Similarly, Del Boca, Darkes, Greenbaum, and Goldman (2004) found that alcohol use increases on New Year’s Eve and other holidays. Other researchers have also found elevated rates of drinking on Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day (Glindemann, Wiegand, & Geller, 2007). Another event with higher rates of drinking is Spring Break (Patrick, Morgan, Maggs, & Lefkowitz, 2011). Grekin, Sher, and Krull (2007) found that increased drinking during Spring break occurred only when students were with friends.

I find that paragraph really challenging to process, because the connections are rarely drawn for the reader. In contrast, here is the start of our paper as actually published (Lefkowitz, Patrick, Morgan, Bezemer, & Vasilenko, 2012):

College student alcohol use is known to increase during the celebration of special events such as 21st birthdays (Rutledge, Park, & Sher, 2008; Smith, Bogle, Talbott, Grant, & Castillo, 2006), football games (Neal & Fromme, 2007b), Spring Break (Grekin, Sher, & Krull, 2007; Patrick, Morgan, Maggs, & Lefkowitz, 2011), and holidays like Halloween and New Year’s Eve (Del Boca, Darkes, Greenbaum, & Goldman, 2004; Glindemann, Wiegand, & Geller, 2007).  

In the latter example, we have summarized across studies, integrating studies that have similar findings.

I’m not comfortable highlighting any examples of published work that is not well integrated, but if you look at 10 articles you have recently read, I guarantee you will find several that list rather than integrate. And here’s another example of well integrated writing, from Dalton and Galambos (2009):

Moving away from parents is a major task of the transition to adulthood. Although some studies have indicated an association of leaving home with less depression and better relations with parents during the transition to adulthood (Aseltine & Gore, 1993; Smetana, Metzger, & Campione-Barr, 2004), others have found that living away from parents was related to a significantly higher risk of binge eating (Barker & Galambos, 2007), more depression (Galambos & Krahn, 2008; Seiffge-Krenke, 2006), and higher alcohol use (Kuo et al., 2002). In any case, living away from parents creates opportunities to engage in sexual activities due to freedom from parental detection.

In this example, I particularly appreciate the way they have set up the “some studies have found X, whereas other studies have found Y” in an integrated way.

We recently discussed this writing issue in my graduate seminar. Some students expressed concern that when they summarize and integrate, they may misrepresent, or at a minimum, miss the nuances, of past research. Of course, you should never misrepresent someone else’s work, or selectively omit things that contradict your argument. However, it is okay if you don’t provide every detail of their work. If someone found that peer rejection was associated with anxiety, depression, and substance use, but your paper focuses on substance use, you don’t need to mention anxiety and depression.

There are other benefits to moving toward more integrated writing. You will find that you have a much better sense of past work when you force yourself to summarize rather than list. In addition, integrated writing often means fewer words, and who doesn’t want that?

“The post Writing an introduction: Integrate, don’t list, past research first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 13, 2014.”

There are numerous techniques that people use for being successful writers. Profhacker has 677 posts about productivity (not all about writing, of course). Common advice is to write every  day. Write first thing in the day. Put writing on your calendar just like a meeting/class. Set up a writing (support) group. Start with an outline. Write freely without editing as you go. Just write. We in HDFS know that individual differences require distinct contexts. Figure out the strategies that work for you and use them.

I spent much more time writing during sabbatical than I do in my regular life. Without teaching and meetings, and with decreased emails and responsibilities, I had many more long dedicated stretches for writing.

But sabbatical reminded me of something else about writing. I don’t need a full day ahead of me to get writing done. In my office, if I have a 1 hour break between meetings, I often fill that hour with email responses, a course-related task, or a task for someone else. But on sabbatical, with fewer of those obligations, I often filled small blocks of time with writing. And guess what? You can write a lot in one concentrated hour. I knew that – but I forgot.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about how to leverage this reminder about the importance of using the time I have to write.

For the past 3 years, I have organized an exercise challenge. Everyone who participates comes up with a personal goal for the number of hours they will exercise that year. Each week, they log their hours exercised, and the system (I use a google spreadsheet for easy sharing and calculating) computes their percentage for the year so far. It has helped me reach my exercise goal each of these 3 years (though as with last year, I’m cutting it close at the end here). Thinking of it as a big picture annual goal, rather than only daily or weekly goals, helps me reach the goal without getting discouraged. Some weeks life slams you, which can interfere with meeting a weekly goal. By tracking annually, you can compensate for a crisis-filled week during a less busy week. It also helps that others are logging, too. The shared nature of it helps with some public accountability, and the weekly percentage helps me stay on track.

So, for 2014, I am going to try a writing challenge, and I hope that you will join me. Here are the parameters/guidelines. I can provide more details by email to anyone who joins:

• If you are interested, comment here or email me, and I will send the google spreadsheet link to you.
• Everyone is responsible for adding their own name and 2014 goal to the google spreadsheet.
• The goal is for the year, so think about your weekly goal, and multiple it out. I like to multiply by 50 instead of 52, because it allows me a cushion for holidays and sick weeks.
• There will be one column per week. Daily, or weekly, add your writing hours to that week’s column.
• The spreadsheet will track your total # of hours and % of your goal for the year. It’s easy to see if you’re on track by noting what week we are on. If it’s week 10, you should be at about 20% of your annual goal.
• Set a goal that’s realistic for you. No judgment from others. If you’re working on your dissertation, you’ll likely set a high weekly goal. If you’re in a brand new tenure track job with 4 new preps, set a lower goal. Set something challenging but achievable. The people who have dropped out of our exercise challenge have tended to be people who set something unrealistic – e.g., someone who rarely exercises and sets a goal of 6 hours a week.
• Make it flexible. If you’d rather set the goal that you write at least every day, rather than a certain number of hours, think of your goal as daily, and set it as such.
• Define “writing” however you choose. For me, I’m including anything I’m first author on: manuscripts, chapters, and grant proposals. I’m including first words to paper and editing. I’m excluding co-authored papers and other types of writing.
• Worried that others will judge your goal? I hope that won’t be the case, and I hope that everyone understands that different people have different work/life circumstances. But if you’re really worried, join with a fake name, or disguise your actual goal with a multiple of your goal (e.g., if your goal is to write for 2 hours a week, write it as 10 hours and give yourself 5 credits for every hour). Of course, we could then all feel guilty that everyone else has such high goals, so if possible, be honest.

I hope some of you will join me in this challenge. But I also know that this type of structure doesn’t work for everyone. When, right before I left for sabbatical, I showed a colleague my excel spreadsheet, structuring my tasks for my 6 months of sabbatical, he broke out in hives. This type of structure and external pressure won’t work for everyone. But if it might work for you, please join me!

“The post Join the 2014 Writing Challenge first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on December 18, 2013.”

The flaw with graduate student writing is that students often set up their writing by describing weaknesses in other people’s work.

Okay, if you’re a graduate student, what did you think when you read that sentence? You might have thought:

1.       I don’t do that!

2.       I do that, but it’s not actually a problem, because…

3.       I do that, and I didn’t know it was a problem, but how rude is she?

When you set up any writing by describing the problems in others’ work, you are at a minimum inviting defensiveness from the reader/reviewer, and potentially opening yourself up to being corrected by the reviewer.

There are very few instances where you should make statements such as “the problem with prior research on this topic is…” or “Johnson and Simpson’s work on alcohol use was flawed in that…” If you make these types of statements, you actually increase the likelihood that Johnson or Simpson might be a reviewer on your paper – if you are directly criticizing their work, the editor might want their opinion on your work.

The majority of the time when I read student papers, theses, or submitted manuscripts that make statements about flaws/problems in past research, the writer is not actually describing a flaw. Instead, the writer is describing something that other researchers have not examined. It is not necessarily a problem that past researchers examined family conflict but did not include measures of family cohesiveness. They may have had different research questions than you do, and that’s okay. Perhaps your research is stronger, or more interesting, or more broad-reaching than their research, but that doesn’t make theirs flawed.

I was once a reviewer on a manuscript where, throughout the introduction, the authors wrote about the “flaws,” “problems,” and “lacunae” of a paper by Lefkowitz et al. I am not at all saying that the Lefkowitz et al. paper was perfect. However, the author was describing simply a topic of interest to her, that we did not address in our paper. Perhaps her paper expanded on or extended our work, but ours was not flawed because we did not ask the very specific research question she had. Her paper was rejected from that journal, not because she criticized me and I was mad, but because she was making incorrect statements and not providing a strong argument for the importance of her work. She submitted it to another journal, without changing any of the “flaw/problem/lacunae” language from the prior draft, despite feedback from the reviewers and editor to do so. And guess what – the second journal also asked me to be a reviewer, and it was rejected from the second journal.  

What should you write rather than describing flaws and problems? Describe what past work has found, and discuss the research questions that you will address that past research has not addressed. Explain how your research is innovative, how it addresses an unanswered theoretical question, or how it will identify points for intervention. Or, if the innovation of your work is a different research method for studying a similar topic, discuss how your methods are important for examining this research topic. Again, you can make all of these statements without directly stating that past work is flawed.  

Should you ever describe past work as flawed? Sure, if past work really is flawed. Let’s say you find a paper that argues that body image and testosterone levels are correlated, and doesn’t account for biological sex. Then please do say that a prior study on this topic is flawed because the authors did not account for biological sex, and you will examine whether body image and testosterone levels are associated after accounting for biological sex differences in testosterone. But please don’t say that someone else’s work is flawed because in their examination of body image, they did not include a sample of boys incarcerated for sexual offenses. You may have many great reasons for asking your research question in this sample, but it doesn’t mean that all prior studies on the topic should have. 

“The post Write about what you are doing, not what others have not first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on December 16, 2013.”

There is a huge sense of relief that comes with defending your thesis, having your committee sign off, and being able to file it. Sometimes an anticlimactic relief, but relief nonetheless. But unfortunately, this relief often comes with a desire to put it aside and not look at it for a while. “I’ll just wait until it’s fresh again.”

Once you’ve shelved it, however, it can become challenging to get back to it. If it’s a master’s thesis in a non-terminal PhD program, you move onto candidacy, comps, and new projects. If it’s a dissertation or a terminal masters, you start a post doc or a full time job, and it becomes harder and harder to pull it out of the proverbial file drawer. Everything else you are doing seems so much more interesting than the dusty old dissertation.

Fine, put it aside for a week. Go out for drinks with your friends. Watch some bad TV. But then pull it out, spiffy it up, and submit it for publication, preferably within 3 months of defending. Why?

Sometimes, I hand write myself notes, or jot notes on my computer in shorthand. If I look at the notes within a couple of days, I figure out what I meant. But if I wait a few weeks, sometimes I can’t read my own writing, or decipher my own shorthand (“fix paper topic”? What does that mean?). Often, your committee will provide edits you must do before you file, and improvements to make in order to get published. If you work on the document soon after the defense, that feedback will be clearer than if you wait a year to finally get back to it.

As you get involved in new projects, other people will rely on you to complete new papers. It will be harder to get back to the thesis when you are working with new people, whom you see every day, who want you to get these new projects completed.

As you get involved in new projects, the dissertation will start to seem weaker. You will be moving onto some of the “future directions” you talked about at the end of your dissertation. Now the dissertation seems somewhat flawed to you, and less important than your new work. Get it submitted right away, and you can build on it, rather than returning back to it when you’ve already done new projects that seem stronger to you.

I admit this one is self-serving. But here it is. Your adviser spent years working on your thesis or dissertation. In the amount of time it takes to supervise a master’s thesis, many faculty could write a first authored paper; for a dissertation, probably two. For me, a thesis or dissertation generally involves weekly meetings for a year or more; hunching over SPSS output for hours with the student; and reading many drafts of various pieces and of the whole. I’m not complaining (most of the time). Supervising graduate students is one of my favorite parts of my job. But it does lead to a sense of loss, in a sense, if that thesis or dissertation never becomes a product to disseminate. You worked hard on it, your adviser worked hard on it, so let’s get it out there.

The publication process takes some time. In a good case scenario, you get an R&R in 2-4 months, you submit a revised paper about 2 months later, you get a conditional accept about 2 months later, and the final version is accepted 2 months later. That’s 9 months, assuming the paper didn’t get rejected from the first journal, in which case you need to add on more months. So, it’s likely to take a year or more to move the paper from first submitted to in press. You want to space out the papers on your CV. If you are planning a tenure track career, this one year is critical. If you just defended your master’s thesis, you want to get it in the pipeline as early as possible so that when you apply for post docs or jobs, you have a paper published during the first half or so of your grad career. If you just defended your dissertation and are starting a post doc, it’s only 1 year or so until you apply for jobs, so you need to get it in the pipeline immediately. If you just started a tenure track job after defending, it’s less than 3 years until your first pre-tenure review, so again, you need to get it in the pipeline.  

 And here’s a place where I can brag about practicing what I (now) preach. I defended my dissertation in June, 1998. I moved to my new (and current) job in August, 1998. But before I moved, I shortened the central paper of my dissertation, and submitted it for publication. I received an R&R in October 1998, when I was quite busy with a new tenure track job and teaching for the first time. But working on revising a manuscript was the perfect task for that level of busy-ness, and much more doable than writing a new one. It was published in 2000. I have a number of papers I have sat on for long periods of time, or that have had more trouble with the publication process. But my dissertation was my life’s work for 2+ years, involved a project I was really proud of and spent an immense amount of time on, and I wanted to make sure to get it published as soon as I could.

In conclusion: File it, take a very short break, and get it out there. Your adviser will thank you, and your future job hunting self will thank you as well.

“The post Filed your thesis or dissertation? You’re not done yet first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on December 2, 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.”