Study skills

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

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

Interviewing

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical guide to interviewing techniques and skills

Interviewing is increasingly a core part of commerce, the professions, and in education, yet few people are aware of the many skills needed to be a good interviewer. This book is an resource for all those looking to improve their interviewing skills. It’s important to stress that the advice offered is for those who will be conducting the interviews, not those on the receiving end. The first part deals with different types of interviews – from people offering advice over the counter on reception desks, to telephone, TV, and job interviews.

Next comes the relationship between interviewer and respondent – how empathy and rapport can built; issues of anonymity and confidentiality; and then truthfulness in representing the purpose of the interview. Anyone who has been asked questions in the street will know how common it is for interviewers to conceal their real purpose or client. Next come the important issues of constructing questions and framing the structure of the formal interview – including feedback loops. This is followed by guidance on interpreting the responses of the person being interviewed. How do we act fairly to judge non-verbal messages for instance?

The latter part of the book deals with specific examples of different types of interview – for academic research, interviewing children, adolescents, older people and those with disabilities; then interviewing people in different cultures, and people in stressful and even antagonistic situations.

It’s written in an accessible style, and is based on a solid framework of both theory and research. Nothing is explored in any particular depth, but for those who might find themselves having to ask the questions, make employment decisions, and either extract information or select personnel, this will be a very reassuring starting point.

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Daphne M. Keats, Interviewing: a practical guide for students and professionals, Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, 2000, pp.162, ISBN: 0335206670

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Learning from Research

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guidance and case studies in research techniques

This is an excellent companion volume to Judith Bell’s best-selling Doing Your Research Project. Here she teams up with Clive Opie to present detailed case studies of several types of research. In Learning from Research they cover the descriptive study, the evaluative and experimental study, the ethnographic study, and the survey – as well as research skills in general. Each section of the book contains instructions on how to tackle the project, the scope of the work involved, and how to review the literature.

There’s also a checklist of what to look for and a thoughtful bibliography, with notes on the significance of the items recommended. If you are embarking on research in the humanities or social sciences, this is offers a supportive and well-informed account of the approaches you might take. The book is based on case studies of five postgraduate students who were completing Master of Education or PhD degrees. They were researching part-time – and at a distance. All five faced sharp learning curves, and they discuss openly some of the mistakes they made, the lessons they learnt and how they might have done things differently.

They cover some of the standard tasks in research – defining the limits of a project, making a review of the literature, and obtaining permissions. The most interesting feature of this guidance manual is that it takes into account the fact that most postgraduates these days are part-time, and are often people holding down jobs.

They describe practical examples of collecting data, constructing questionnaires, and how to deal with the results. There’s also a realistic approach to the use of IT in research. Many people mistakenly believe that IT skills are highly developed in higher education – which is not true. So there is straightforward advice on data collection and analysis.

There are also plenty of suggestions for further reading, a helpful series of checklists, and a glossary of terms.

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Judith Bell and Clive Opie, Learning from Research, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002, pp.261, ISBN 0335206603

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Managing Information for Research

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical strategies for data management and research

Most people feel challenged when faced with the prospect of a research project. And why not? After all, it’s not something we do every day. The biggest problem (usually) is knowing how to cope with both the shape and the volume of information. Elizabeth Orna’s advice in Managing Information for Research is that we should concentrate on managing the process of research. She deals with the essential questions which are asked by anybody undertaking a project. What am I looking for? Why am I looking for it? How shall I set about the task? Where shall I start looking? And she answers these questions by showing practical examples and demonstrating how to both define and limit the task. Her evidence is drawn from a long and distinguished career, working in education and government.

What she is offering here are “ways of thinking about information, and practical techniques of applying the thinking that are characteristic of the disciplines known variously as ‘information science’, ‘librarianship’, ‘information management’, or ‘information studies’.” This is not how to grub around for your data, but what to do with it when you’ve got it.

She discusses for instance the simple practicalities of organising information – on cards; on A4 pages; and in indexes. [This section is crying out for extended hypertext consideration in the next edition.] She also gives an excellent example (culled from a negative experience on an MA course) of why it is important to keep a full documentary record of a research project – complete with a list of the documents required to do it. This is first-rate advice, generated from first-hand educational experience.

There’s also a section on time management, complete with guidance on estimating how long it will take to complete tasks – and what to do when you can’t realistically meet your deadlines. The purpose and readership of a project should be kept in mind so that it’s designed to meet the requirements of an intended audience – and there’s a useful checklist of questions you can apply to any work you produce.

She covers a number of possible ways of presenting your results – which leads into a consideration of what is now called ‘information architecture’. That is, thinking clearly about the way in which data is displayed in order to be useful, easily understood, and effective. This points towards the sort of work being done by Edward Tufte and the University of Reading, both of which sources I was glad to see listed in the excellent bibliographies of further reading which follow each chapter.

The latter parts of the book deal with the importance of effective page layout and good typographical design in the presentation of data. Graham Stevens points readers towards that most important feature in the principles of good design – over-riding the default settings of your word-processor. He covers the details of font choice, line length, margins, grids, word spacing, heading hierarchies, and close editing in its relation to the effective visual display of information.

The publishers have had the good sense to let him completely re-design this hugely enlarged second edition of the book. The result is tremendous improvement on the first. It’s now a production which follows the very same principles it lays down for the efficient presentation of information. It’s also an excellent piece of work which will help anyone who is prepared to learn about the most effective manner of organising and presenting information.

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Elizabeth Orna with Graham Stevens, Managing Information for Research, Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, second edition 2009, pp.271, ISBN: 0335221424

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MHRA Style Guide

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

pocket academic writing style guide for humanities

The key to this style guide is in its subtitle: ‘Notes for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses’. It has been produced by the Modern Humanities Research Association as a manual of advice and procedures for people preparing texts for publication. The MHRA Style Guide assembles a set of conventions to help users through the minutiae of the scholarly editing and presentation of texts.

If you are a student, a researcher, or a writer, the net result is a brief and very usable guide. One of its principal advantages over other guides is its brevity: it only includes the essentials, and everything is easy to find. And yet it covers everything you would normally require for academic writing or formal publication – from spelling, abbreviations, and punctuation through to the thorny issue of bibliographic referencing, which is what often drives students into fits of nail-biting frenzy.

It’s all very succinct, and yet manages to pack in the presentation of foreign languages, citations from articles, journals, and newspapers, and even a nod towards the Author-Date (or Harvard) system of referencing.

The latest edition has been expanded to cover preparing texts for electronic publication and there are sections on indexing and writing a thesis or a dissertation. There’s a glossary, sections on book reviews and correcting proofs, and a good index.

I first came across this book when it was chosen by the Open University as a set text for some of its postgraduate courses. Getting students to follow the conventions is still hard work, but it’s a lot easier than it used to be.

What I like most about the book is that it gives you the impression that you’re just about to publish an important piece of work. Since it’s also amazingly cheap, it’s worth buying as a confidence-booster alone.

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MHRA Style Guide: Notes for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, new second edition 2008, pp.95, ISBN: 0947623620

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New Hart’s Rules

July 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

style and text-presentation rules for writers and editors

New Hart’s Rules started its life as the house style rule book for editorial principles at Oxford University Press. It was written by Horace Henry Hart who was Printer to the Press, and first published in 1893 as quite a slim volume. But it has become so popular ever since that it grew in size and eventually reached a thirty-ninth edition. Now it has been enlarged even further and completely re-cast in a new format, adapted from The Oxford Guide to Style, but retaining much of the content and the spirit of the old Hart’s Rules.

The guide deals with the typographic details of assembling writing ready for its appearance in printed form. This includes punctuation, capitalization, italicization, abbreviations, and the presentation of numbers. The latest edition also has completely new chapters covering law and legal references, tables, illustrations, indexing, plus copyright and other publishing responsibilities. Each chapter has been given far more illustrative examples.

For instance, my edition of the old 39th edition has less than 200 pages: this new version has more than 400. The beauty of this book – in common with other style guides which have become classics – is that it quickly establishes the general rule, then all further examples are the difficult, awkward, and obscure cases. For those people endlessly puzzled by spelling-checkers, there is an explanation of the rules governing -ise and -ize. OUP have always favoured -ize, so surprisingly it’s criticize yet compromise, and agonize yet televise.

The principles underlying the need for consistent conventions remain as important as ever. The presentation of money, time, dates, and even the points of the compass are included, as well as temperature, Latin plant and animal names, capitalization of titles, word breaks (hyphenation) and such wonderfully arcane details as the need for a possessive ‘s’ in Roman following an italicized title – as in the Dreadnought‘s crew.

There’s an explanation of proof correction (with examples) and a guide to punctuation, symbols, and the presentation of scientific equations and formulae. Then in the centre of the book there is a section dealing with the alternate spellings of ‘difficult’ words (colander, haemorrhoids, skiing) then a very useful explanation of the rules on the tricky issue of doubling consonants at word endings (billeted, compelled, travelling) and plurals formed in non-English words (bacilli, errata, matrices).

Hart then takes on the topic of language change in listing those words which have progressed from compounds to single words (a process which is usually faster in the US than the UK) – antifreeze, lifetime, tonight – though it is hard for a book of this type to keep up with contemporary developments in this respect. Do we write word processor, word-processor, or wordprocessor, for instance? However, Hart has no hesitation in recommending birth-rate, copy-book, and test-tube.

Guidance on how to deal with foreign languages include sections on French, German, Italian, and Russian – plus Welsh, Dutch and Afrikaans which have been added in the latest edition.

The latter part of the book includes a complete checklist of topics to be covered in preparing a book for publication: text, footnotes, illustrations, bibliographies, tables, and even how to deal with plays and poetry. And finally, since it’s quite hard to locate items in such a tightly-compacted work of reference, there’s an excellent index.

This is a source for anyone interested in the preparation of text for print. If you have a research paper, an article, or a book which you hope will see light of day as a publication, then do yourself a favour and buy this marvelous guide to the small details which make all the difference between an amateurish and a properly edited piece of writing.

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New Hart’s Rules, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.417, ISBN: 0198610416

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Numbers, Tables, and Charts

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical guidance on the visual presentation of data

Have you ever seen a document containing numbers, tables, and charts – and been unable to understand the information being displayed. Of course you have; and the fault is not yours. The data has simply not been presented effectively. This book deals with the data presentation skills required to show numbers, tables, and graphs in documents and presentations. Many people assemble their data honestly enough when writing reports and giving presentations, but they often do so without thinking how incomprehensible it might be to the audience.

Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of beginner’s manuals on communication skills. The emphasis is on no-nonsense advice directly related to everyday life. The authors show you how to present numerical data to make its outcomes more self-evident and more easily digestible. This is done by putting figures into a logical order, adding focus to the data, and using layout to guide the reader’s eye towards what is significant.

They cover how to design tables. It’s amazing how much clearer these can be made by removing unnecessary grid lines, aligning numbers and column headings, creating clear titles and headings, and removing any ‘chart junk’.

Graphs should be uncluttered, simple, non-misleading in terms of scale and numbers, and used to illustrate a clear message.

They show how to construct graphs and bar charts so that they immediately reveal the significance of the data they contain. There are also examples of when to use pie charts, scattergrams, and pictographs (small icons)

There’s also useful writing skills advice on how to integrate numbers and statistics into the text of documents. For instance, don’t start sentences with figures or digits, and how to mix the use of words and digits to clarify meaning, as in nine 6-inch rulers and three 5-a-side football matches.

Most presentation of data is these days done using office software packages, so it’s good that they give this a mention, with tips for creating good handouts.

They finish with a case study which tracks the raw data of some school exam results from gathering to final presentation. The grades and numbers can be presented in different ways, and the head teacher must choose the best way for a meeting with the governors.

The chapters of this book are short, but almost every page is rich in hints and tips. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some manuals can be quite frightening. This is a book which will reassure those who need it.

The all-time star in this field is Edward Tufte, on whose work they draw substantially. I was glad to see him listed in the bibliography. This is a cheap and cheerful version of the same layout principles he promotes in his beautifully designed books.

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Sally Bigwood and Melissa Spore, Presenting Numbers, Tables, and Charts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.144, ISBN: 0198607229

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Online style guides

September 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Writer’s Workshop
Writing skills, grammar, teaching notes, bibliographic style, tips, and plenty more.
http://www.cws.illinois.edu/workshop/

Guide to Grammar and Writing
Very good grammar guide, plus other resources.
http://www.englishgrammar.org/

Purdue On-line Writing Lab
Purdue’s famous OWL, useful for general writing concerns
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

How to Cite Electronic Sources
Practical examples from Library of Congress.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/start/cite/index.html

The Elements of Style
William Strunk, Jr.’s original 1918 classic. The ‘bare bones’ approach to common problems.
http://www.bartleby.com/141/

On-Line Study Resources
Style, grammar, essay-writing, citations and footnotes, plagiarism and presentation from the University of New South Wales.
http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/olib.html

WIRED Style
Wired Magazine’s online version of their print publication Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. A guide to writing and editing which looks at the problems thrown up by the new language of the digital age.
http://hotwired.lycos.com/hardwired/wiredstyle/

alt.usage.english – Style FAQ
Mark Israel’s Frequently Asked Questions covers common English usage questions, word etymology, online and offline references, and more.
http://www.english-usage.com/faq.html

WebGrammar
Judy Vorfeld’s excellent site covers some of the most common writing mistakes, including spelling, grammar and homonym errors.
http://www.webgrammar.com

IEEE Computer Society Style Guide
Handy if you wish to submit papers going to their journals, or do any work using their style.
Download the style guide here (PDF)

Here are some other UK journalism styleguides available online:

Financial Times Lexicon

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Online! a guide to using Internet sources

November 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

academic referencing and writing style guide

This is a handy spiral-bound pocketbook which offers a compact guide to academic writing and its relation to the Internet. It presents standards for accessing, evaluating, and quoting Net sources. Most importantly, it shows you how to present digital referencing in academic writing. These are issues facing many students [and tutors] in the sudden eruption of the digital world into what was a bibliographic tradition dating back to the early Renaissance.

The orientation is entirely American, but it includes models for citation in four different systems: the Modern Languages Association (MLA), American Psychological Association (APA), Council of Biology Editors (CBE) and Chicago University Press styles. Any of these could be adapted by European readers. They go into all the nit-picking details of where colons and angled brackets should be placed, where to use mono-spaced fonts to indicate addresses, and how best to break long URLs across consecutive lines.

The guide also includes tips for writing and publishing on the Net, and a directory of Net sources in the major academic disciplines. There is a rather good glossary, imaginatively placed at the front of the book; it has a full index, and the contents pages are well-designed. It includes some very helpful tips by the way – such as examples of lesser-know but useful URLs, and it even includes a brief chapter on how to create your own Web site.

In a bibliographic world where locations are ever-shifting, and where files can be updated on the hour, it includes important details on the dating and updating of files for the purposes of academic accuracy, and the evaluation of sources.

There has been some discussion in mailing list groups recently which has criticized the obsession with accuracy on these issues as an arm of the academic establishment’s concern with form at the expense of content. (This seems to be an issue which is more prevalent in the US than the UK it seems.) However, anybody who anticipates referencing digital sources in academic writing will find this a useful resource – and terrific value at the price.

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Andrew Harnack and Eugene Kleppinger, Online! a reference
guide to using Internet sources, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997, pp.162, ISBN: 0312150237

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Organising and Participating in Meetings

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to run meetings and produce the paperwork

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. In this case it’s organising and running meetings, creating the documents which support them, and participating in them to best effect. Judith Leigh usefully starts off Organising and Participating in Meetings with the language of meetings and the roles of key figures such as minutes secretary, chair, and observers.

She then describes how to recruit suitable people to participate in a meeting and serve on a committee, and how to arrange the practicalities of booking venues and travel arrangements so as to maximise the chances of a successful outcome. She then covers the key documentation of meetings – discussion papers, agendas, and reports. This includes the order in which items should be tabled and recorded, plus tips on dealing with documents in paper and electronic form.

There’s a chapter on participation which includes both the ‘rules’ of debate and argument, as well as advice on doing Powerpoint presentations. Then comes the most unpopular task of all – taking the minutes. You’ll be lucky if you can get anybody to volunteer for this job.

Then comes a real gem I haven’t seen in books of this kind before – how to participate in meetings conducted by telephone, email, and video conferencing. She finishes with a checklist of steps to be taken, a glossary of Latin terms and financial jargon, and some templates for meeting papers and agendas.

If you’ve never run a meeting before, this tells you everything you need to know. And it’s all presented in a clear and simple manner, with the emphasis on achieving a positive outcome. That’s a long way from some of the farcical, corrupt, and often pointless meetings which I’ve had to sit through in the world of education in the last thirty years.

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Judith Leigh, Organising and Participating in Meetings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.144, ISBN: 019866284X

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Passing Exams without Anxiety

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

popular guide to revision and examination techniques

David Acres is a counsellor and a specialist in learning and stress management. He applies these skills to all stages of what’s required for exam success – in any subject and at all levels, from GCSE and A Level to university level. He deals with all the common issues of time management, confidence, motivation, and study conditions, as well as the techniques you need in the exam room itself. The approach he takes encourages you to ask questions and break up tasks into smaller parts. This helps you to analyse what you need to do to complete tasks. He also recommends a pick-and-mix strategy – dipping in and out of the book and choosing those techniques which suit you best.

The advice he gives is sound. Make a revision timetable; check your coursework deadlines; study past papers; make notes and summaries; and get to know what examiners are looking for. He provides plenty of checklists and recommends the use of planning and time charts, diagrams, lists, and mind maps. The section on improving your memory becomes a little bit like a personal therapy session – but he does explore a wide variety of methods for exercising and improving your powers of recovering information.

The main emphasis of the book is concerned with relieving stress and anxiety – so this will appeal to those who are looking for reassurance and nerve-calming techniques. It’s now in its fifth edition – which is a sure recommendation.

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David Acres, Passing Exams Without Anxiety, Oxford: How to Books, 1998, pp.182, ISBN: 1857032691

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Study skills

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

practical guide to interviewing techniques and skills

guidance and case studies in research techniques

practical strategies for data management and research

pocket academic writing style guide for humanities

style and text-presentation rules for writers and editors

practical guidance on the visual presentation of data

academic referencing and writing style guide

how to run meetings and produce the paperwork

popular guide to revision and examination techniques

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