Study skills

writing and study skills for academic work, research, and projects

writing and study skills for academic work, research, and projects

A Manual for Writers of Term Papers

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling guide for term papers and academic essays

A Manual for Writers of Term Papers is the more-or-less standard US guidebook on academic writing. It’s based on The Chicago Manual of Style, and offers a comprehensive and very detailed guide to the conventions of layout and presentation. In the last half century since it first appeared, this book has gone through six editions, and even though editorship has passed into other hands, the spirit of Kate Turabian’s original approach has been preserved.

It covers everything from spelling, punctuation, and abbreviations to quotation, referencing, and the use of tables and diagrams. And all guidance notes are illustrated with real-life (and up-to-date) examples. There’s a huge chapter dealing with every possible complication in showing reference notes, and even a section dealing with government documents.

The latest edition includes a useful useful chapter on sample pages. These show how to lay out text on a page, according to the conventions for academic documents – title page, list of contents, tables, maps, footnotes, and so on. There’s also a recent addition on computers and word-processing (which already needs updating) and an excellent index.

Even if you are working to UK rather than US conventions, this is a very useful reference. It sits on my reference shelf alongside the Concise OED and an old copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and it gets used just as often. It gets more hits at this site than any other book, and it has sold more than five million copies. That’s quite some guarantee!

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Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, (6th edn) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp.300, ISBN: 0226823377

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Communication for Engineering Students

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

writing and speaking skills for science and engineering

Are science and engineering students in special need of help with their writing skills? This seems to be a generally held belief, and John Davies takes it as the starting-point for this manual. His approach is to divide the writing task into discrete topics, each of which he treats in separate chapters. He covers Sentences, Grammar and Style, Technical Information, Laboratory Reports, Projects, and even Spoken Presentations, Job Applications, and Interview Techniques.

The general approach is to offer sound, sensible advice, and he points out that there are few absolute rules. The way to improve your writing, he suggests, is “to think about what you write”. This is good advice, in whichever branch of engineering [or science] it might be applied.

He offers brief exercises (with answers) in each chapter, and I would guess that a first or second-year engineering student would find his avuncular tone reassuring. However, some sections – those on word-processors and examinations for instance – skip over the issues rather rapidly.

In this sense the strength of a book which covers so many topics in such a short space could also be construed as its weakness. However, on balance I suspect that the students at whom it is aimed are likely to be overwhelmed by a more encyclopaedic approach. Davies’ light touch should encourage them to adopt good practices and pursue the finer details in further reading which is given at the end of each chapter.

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John W. Davies, Communication for Engineering Students, London: Longman, 1996, pp.167, ISBN: 0582256488

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Copy Editing

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a handbook for editors, authors, and publishers

Judith Butcher’s Copy Editing is now firmly established as the UK classic reference guide for editors and others involved in preparing text for publication. It is written from the perspective of a professional copy-editor, and covers just about everything you would need to know in preparing any sort of text for publication. It deals with all the details of preparing a typescript for setting, house styles and consistency, reading and correcting proofs, and how to present indexes and bibliographies.

Every suggestion is scrupulously illustrated without being pedantic, and there is a very helpful degree of cross-referencing. I originally bought my own copy of this book to sort out the finer points of bibliographic referencing for academic writing – and I’ve been using it regularly ever since. The book itself is almost a tutorial on the very principles it illustrates, and it is a very handsomely produced and elegantly designed publication. You will learn a lot on the presentation of text just from turning the pages.

It contains explanations of every part of a book – from details such as preliminary matter, frontispiece, title page, and content, through to lists of tables and illustrations, acknowledgements, bibliographies, notes, and indexes. And it covers many types of printed book – from conventional prose, through books on mathematics, music, books with tables and illustrations, and books set in foreign languages.

The latest edition also deals with issues of copyright, the conventions of presenting text in specialist subjects, guidance on digital coding and publishing in other media such as e-books, and a chapter devoted to on-screen copy-editing.

It has also been updated to take account of modern typesetting and printing technology. This is a good investment for writers who are serious about preparing their work for publication, and an excellent source of reference when you get stuck with the minutiae of bibliographies and typographic presentation. It’s also now available in paperback.

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Judith Butcher, Copy-Editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers, 4th edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp.558, ISBN: 0521847133

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Doing your Research Project

November 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling guide to research methods and techniques

Judith Bell is a distinguished authority on educational practice, and she had the foresight to produce what many students crave – a clearly written guide to research methods. The result was Doing your Research Project, a source of reference and a guide to good research practice which has become a best-seller. It was produced for students in education and the social sciences, but anybody embarking on a lengthy written project would profit from reading this book.

The strength of her approach is clarity and good organisation. Separate chapters deal with each stage of undertaking a project in a way which explains exactly what is required, and it’s written in a humane and friendly manner. Topics covered include the selection of a research subject, collecting data and keeping records, reviewing the literature, designing questionnaires, interpreting evidence, and presenting the findings. The book has sold more than 200,000 copies by the way.

What I liked particularly was the fact that she covers exactly those issues which intimidate many students when they first tackle a lengthy project. How to identify a proposal from amongst the materials you have assembled; how to keep track of your notes; how to actually produce such a long piece of work; and what to do with the results you finally assemble.

This is an excellent guide to research methods and writing which well deserves the success it has found as the more-or-less standard work in this area. It’s suitable for anyone producing an undergraduate project, an MA or MEd dissertation, or even a PhD thesis.

Make sure you get the latest fifth edition, because it’s been updated to include materials on the use of computers and information technology. It also has more examples of research in a wider range of disciplines, and additions to checklists. There are also new materials on research diaries, plagiarism, and the use of Internet resources. Each chapter has a summary checklist and its own suggestions for further reading. There’s also a full bibliography.

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Judith Bell, Doing Your Research Project: A Guide for First-Time Researchers in Education and Social Science, 5th edition, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2010, pp.290, ISBN: 0335235824

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Electronic Texts in the Humanities

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Electronic Texts in the Humanities is an excellent overview of the relation between computers and texts. It covers all the essential issues in understanding the latest possibilities of using digitised text in academic study and research. Susan Hockey deals with all aspects of the encoding, markup, and tagging which renders an electronic version of any text searchable and accurate. She also discusses the currently available software and indicates what future developments are required to extend its usefulness. It’s a book which will be of interest to linguists, lexicographers, socio-linguists, literary theorists, historians, and any humanities discipline which relies on the interpretation of texts.

Along the way she gives an assessment of the existing scholarship in her accounts of research papers and the most recent articles. There are some very useful explanations of SGML and XML, the Dublin Core standards for meta-data, and the Poughkeepsie Principles for encoding and interchange of electronic text. She explains how once a text is in digital form, it can be used to produce concordances, alphabetical listings, and a variety of sortings which can reveal how the same word is used in different contexts. There’s also a chapter describing how literary critics have used computer-generated analysis to assist their interpretations of texts – amongst which she also includes analysis of poetry and non-Latinate languages.

There’s also coverage of corpora – which are large databases of examples from spoken or written sources. These are used as the basis for statistical analysis to show language change, frequency of use, and contextual usages.

This is followed by what’s called ‘stylometry and attribution studies’. That is, making the case that author A wrote text B because of certain measurable word choices or patterns. These quasi-scientific tests have been used to examine cases of disputed authorship such as the Gospels from the Bible and some of the texts in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy. There are also some examples of the shortcomings of these approaches when used in court cases as evidence.

The chapter I found most interesting was on textual criticism and electronic editions. This deals with establishing editorial principles, and it also examines the possibilities of multiple editions (archives) as well as showing how these can be produced in a variety of forms once they have been tagged.

She ends with dictionaries and lexical databases, describing in detail the major enterprise of producing the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as projects which examine old dictionaries to see what they can tell us about the people who compiled them.

This study concentrates on tools and techniques for working with electronic-based sources in the humanities. Its primary audience is teachers and students working in language-based subjects. But it will also be of interest to librarians and information scientists who are now working with electronic texts. For anyone interested in digital writing, it’s worth it for the superb bibliography alone – thirty pages which will take you in whichever direction you wish to go.

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Susan Hockey, Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.227, ISBN: 0198711956

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Essays and Dissertations

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the basics of academic planning and writing skills

Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of short beginners’ manuals on communication skills. Their emphasis is on compact, no-nonsense advice directly related to issues of everyday life. Chris Mounsey’s Essays and Dissertations tackles the essentials of academic writing in a systematic manner. He begins with understanding and interpreting essay questions, then moves on to the research you might have to do to answer them.

This involves selecting books, finding quotes, and developing the outline of your own arguments. This is followed by the central point of almost all successful writing – planning. Next comes editing and writing drafts, then how to present your results, using a word processor.

Having covered these basics, he then moves up a notch to cover the more advanced skills of time management, Internet research, and alternative strategies for writing essays. This leads into the special problems posed by dissertations, then exams.

The book ends with a series of writing checklists, guidance on common mistakes, how to deal with footnotes and bibliography, and suggestions for further reading.

The chapters are short; almost every page has hints, tips, and quotes in call-out boxes, there are checklists and suggestions for further reading. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some writing guides can be quite frightening.

This book provides students at all levels with easy-to-follow guidance on how to structure an essay and how to select and research the most appropriate subject to write on. You will need more guidance when it comes to writing a long dissertation, but this book will certainly help you to reach that point.

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Chris Mounsey, Essays and Dissertations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp.128, ISBN: 0198605056

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Excellent Dissertations!

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

advanced study and research skills as simple notes

Once you’ve got your first degree, it’s often assumed that you will know exactly what to do in any post-graduate research work. That’s not usually true, and books like Excellent Dissertations! are helping to rectify the deficiency. Peter Levin’s approach is to break everything down into the simplest possible units. The most important characteristic of this book is that it is short and gets straight to the point. He offers useful checklists of what examiners are looking for in the successful dissertation.

These are likely to be the same, no matter what your subject – clear methodology, firm structure, and attention to detail. In my experience, most people writing long projects and dissertations find all these quite hard to produce. That’s why this sort of advice is useful. He helps you to make the distinction between a project and a dissertation, between the research and the writing up of results. He shows you how to explore the existing literature on your subject – which is different than writing a literature review – often another popular writing task in HE, This is dealt with separately in some detail in a chapter of its own.

There’s advice on how to compile a list of sources accurately, and he gives you useful tips such as starting to create your bibliography right from the start.

writing a literature review when you aren’t yet on top of your material is one of the most mind-numbing, brain-deadening, sleep-inducing activities known to students

There’s a separate chapter on methodology, which can be anything from a technique, a procedure, a hypothesis, to a philosophic argument. And if you are stuck for ideas, he shows you how to choose a subject or topic for the dissertation – with examples.

He looks at the management of the project in terms of your time – how to plan, what do first, how to keep going when things get rough.

At the end of the book – and I think this is the right place for it – there is advice on planning your project outline, editing your drafts, and conforming to the academic styles of referencing and producing bibliographies.

My only criticism of this guide is that it needs lists of further reading, web references, and an index. Maybe these can be added if there’s a second edition.

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Peter Levin, Excellent Dissertations!, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005, pp.122, ISBN: 0335218229

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Full Marks punctuation for scientists

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

advice on punctuation for scientific and technical writing

Do scientists and technical writers need special advice on punctuation? Well, in one sense – who doesn’t? John Kirkman sets out here to answer what he describes as ‘the queries raised most frequently by practitioners in computing, engineering, medicine, and science as they grapple with day-to-day tasks in writing and editing’. So, it’s a guide based on practical experience, and probably the better for it. Punctuation for Scientists is a specialist style guide aimed at practicioners in these disciplines.

There is an introduction explaining why good punctuation is necessary. This is slightly more complex than it needs to be, and might more usefully been placed at the end of the book. But after that he gets down to a simple explanation of the basics – apostrophes, capitals, colons, commas, full stops, hyphens, and quotation marks. The advice might be aimed at technical authors, but there’s no reason why other writers shouldn’t profit from it.

One of the strengths of the book is that it has plenty of practical examples. Another is that John Kirkman has spent quite some time teaching in the USA, and he offers UK/US equivalents wherever appropriate, which gives the guide some added value for those who need to keep such matters in mind.

On the whole, he wisely avoids the jargon of grammar in his explanations, but there’s rather a lot of intrusive first person singular (which doesn’t always inspire confidence) and some of the advice is expressed in terms which are likely to confuse the very people it is written for:

English teachers may have told you that you should always signal restrictive intention by starting your relative clause with that…

Of course one might quibble with some of his recommendations (are continuous capitals ever necessary?) but he offers very sensible and non-dogmatic advice on issues such as the use of the hyphen in terms like ‘re-activate’, ‘de-energise’, and ‘re-adjust’, and he quite rightly alerts his readers to the different names used for brackets, parentheses, and braces in the UK, the US, and non-scientific writing. To a beginner this might seem like pedantry, but ultimately it’s the stuff of which accuracy and scholarship is made.

There are three appendices – one on paragraphing, one on word division (hyphenation at line ending) and one on differences between UK and US English. There’s a brief bibliography, a full index, and by current book price standards, it’s dirt cheap.

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John Kirkman, Full Marks: Advice on punctuation for scientific and technical writing, (3rd edn) Wiltshire: Ramsbury, 1999, pp.115, ISBN: 0952176246

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Getting Published: guide for lecturers

July 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

insider tips for putting academic writing into print

We all know that in the present climate of academic writing, it’s a case of publish – or perish. The stress on doing ‘research’ then getting published is almost the only way to ‘get on’. This book tells you how to do it. Despite the dubious imperatives, Jerry Wellington starts out by looking at the huge variety of positive reasons why people write and publish – as well as the numerous fears which might prevent others from doing so. He argues largely in favour of publishing in established, printed journals on the grounds that they offer the author more credence and protection – though there’s no mention of the amazingly small number of people who ever read them.

Next comes advice in taking account of the publication in which your writing will appear, its readership, and most crucially the type of article or review and how it will best fit the editor’s requirements. There’s a long section on ‘the writing process’ based on interviews with people who describe their approaches (the planners and the improvisers) as well as their reactions to peer review and criticism. You are certain to find somebody in here who shares your own approach. He describes what to write about, and even offers a checklist on how to be original.

He then describes the process of submitting an article for publication – both from the writer’s and publisher’s point of view. Much of this is taken up with the pros and cons of the peer review process.

Then comes the case of publishing in book form. After warning quite rightly that you shouldn’t write a word until you have a contract, he then shows you how to prepare a publication proposal in great detail.

He throws in some observations and tips on the techniques of writing – how to plan and structure your work; how to edit and re-write what you produce; and how to develop a sense of ‘good writing’.

Finally he looks at future possible trends in publishing – which focus largely on electronic journals and what’s called ‘self-archiving’. Anyone interested in this development would do well to look at the work of Steven Harnad in this field.

And for those who want to take the subject seriously, this book could profitably read alongside Peter Wood’s Successful Writing for Qualitative Researchers.

I wrote this review on the day the UK government announced it would allow the formation of new non-research universities. So the rules of the game may well be changing soon. For most people however, the steps to getting published in the academic world will remain the same; and they are all covered here.

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Jerry Wellington, Getting Published: a guide for lecturers and researchers, London: Routledge, 2003, pp.136, ISBN: 0415298476

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Giving Presentations

May 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

presentation skills for lectures, demonstrations, and talks

This book will show you what’s required in giving presentations. That means how to plan and structure the presentation; how to choose and prepare good visual aids; and how to deliver your presentation with confidence, either individually or as part of a team. The contents of Jo Billingham’s book are arranged in the logical manner you need if your presentation is to be successful. First prepare and structure what you are going to say; then choose your visual aids and arrange them in an effective manner.

Next, you need to make notes and rehearse what you are going to deliver. Even if you do this in a room on your own it’s better than being unprepared. The presentation itself is explored completely. What happens if something goes wrong? How do you make maximum impact? What do we do about being nervous? How to dress – up or down? There is plenty of good advice on coping with all these problems. Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of short beginners’ guides on communication skills. The emphasis is on compact, no-nonsense advice directly related to issues of everyday life.

Given the controversy surrounding the much-used and some would say over-used market-leading software PowerPoint, it’s good that she discusses the disadvantages as well as the advantages of using it.

The chapters of these guides are short and to-the-point; but the pages are rich in hints, tips, and quotes in call-out boxes. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some manuals can be quite overbearing.

There are lots of tips on the use of visual aids – one of the potential nightmares when doing presentations – and she offers a very useful checklist of things to do.

When I last gave a presentation using a computer and a data projector, the system packed up after five minutes. “Thank goodness for the humble overhead projector” I confidently declared – whereupon the bulb in the OHP blew up. The moral is – be prepared. Be doubly prepared.

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Jo Billingham, Giving Presentations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.144, ISBN: 0198606818

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Study skills

writing and study skills for academic work, research, and projects

best-selling guide for term papers and academic essays

writing and speaking skills for science and engineering

a handbook for editors, authors, and publishers

best-selling guide to research methods and techniques

the basics of academic planning and writing skills

advanced study and research skills as simple notes

advice on punctuation for scientific and technical writing

insider tips for putting academic writing into print

presentation skills for lectures, demonstrations, and talks

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