Читать книгу How to write essays (English for Academic Purposes) - Александра Ковалева - Страница 6

We have now reached the point where we can confidently set about our research. We’ve interpreted the meaning and implications of the question, in the course of which we’ve analysed the key concepts involved. From there we’ve brainstormed the question using our interpretation as our key structure. As a result, we now know two things: what questions we want answered from our research; and what we already know about the topic.

There are three main key skills in research: reading, note-taking and organisation.

It’s important to read purposefully: to be clear about why we’re reading a particular passage so that we can select the most appropriate reading strategy. Many of us get into the habit of reading every passage word-forword, regardless of our purpose in reading it, when in fact it might be more efficient to skim or scan it. Adopting a more flexible approach to our reading in this way frees up more of our time, so that we can read around our subject and take on board more ideas and information.

It also gives us more time to process the ideas. We will see how important this is if we are to avoid becoming just ‘surface-level processors’, reading passively without analysing and structuring what we read, or criticising and evaluating the arguments presented. We will examine the techniques involved in analysing a passage to extract its structure, so that we can recall the arguments, ideas and evidence more effectively. We will also learn the different ways we can improve our ability to criticise and evaluate the arguments we read. In this way we can become ‘deep-level processors’, actively processing what we read and generating more of our own ideas.

But before you hit the books, a warning! It’s all too easy to pick up a pile of books that appear vaguely useful and browse among them. This might be enjoyable, and you might learn something, but it will hardly help you get your essay written. Now that you’ve interpreted the question and you’ve brainstormed the issues, you have a number of questions and topics you want to pursue. You are now in a position to ask clear questions as you read the books and the other materials you’ve decided to use in your research.

Nevertheless, before you begin you need to pin down exactly the sections of each book that are relevant to your research. Very few of the books you use will you read from cover to cover. With this in mind, you need to consult the contents and index pages in order to locate those pages that deal with the questions and issues you’re interested in.

To ensure that you’re able to do ‘deep-level processing’, it may be necessary to accept that you need to do two or three readings of the text, particularly if it is technical and closely argued.

Reading for comprehension

In your first reading you might aim just for the lower ability range, for comprehension, just to understand the author’s arguments. It may be a subject you’ve never read about before, or it may include a number of unfamiliar technical terms that you need to think about carefully each time they are used.

Reading for analysis and structure

In the next reading you should be able to analyse the passage into sections and subsections, so that you can see how you’re going to organise it in your notes. If the text is not too difficult you may be able to accomplish both of these tasks (comprehension and analysis) in one reading, but always err on the cautious side, don’t rush it. Remember, now that you’ve identified just those few pages that you have to read, rather than the whole book, you can spend more time processing the ideas well.

Reading for criticism and evaluation

The third reading involves criticising and evaluating your authors’ arguments. It’s clear that in this and the second reading our processing is a lot more active. While in the second we’re analysing the passage to take out the structure, in this, the third, we’re maintaining a dialogue with the authors, through which we’re able to criticise and evaluate their arguments. To help you in this, keep the following sorts of questions in mind as you read.

• Are the arguments consistent or are they contradictory?

• Are they relevant (i.e. do the authors use arguments they know you’ll agree with, but which are not relevant to the point they’re making)?

• Do they use the same words to mean different things at different stages of the argument (what’s known as the fallacy of equivocation)?

• Are there underlying assumptions that they haven’t justified?

• Can you detect bias in the argument?

• Do they favour one side of the argument, giving little attention to the side for which they seem to have least sympathy? For example, do they give only those reasons that support their case, omitting those that don’t (the fallacy of special pleading)?

• Is the evidence they use relevant?

• Is it strong enough to support their arguments?

• Do they use untypical examples, which they know you will have to agree with, in order to support a difficult or extreme case (what’s known as the fallacy of the straw man)?

• Do they draw conclusions from statistics and examples which can’t adequately support them?

This sounds like a lot to remember, and it is, so don’t try to carry this list along with you as you read. Just remind yourself of it before you begin to criticise and evaluate the text. Having done this two or three times you will find more and more of it sticks and you won’t need reminding. Then, after you’ve finished the passage, go through the list again and check with what you can recall of the text. These are the sort of questions you will be asking in Stage 5 (Revision) about your own essay before you hand it in. So it’s a good idea to develop your skills by practising on somebody else first.

One last caution – don’t rush into this. You will have to give yourself some breathing space between the second reading and this final evaluative reading. Your mind will need sufficient time to process all the material, preferably overnight, in order for you to see the issues clearly and objectively. If you were to attempt to criticise and evaluate the author’s ideas straight after reading them for the structure, your own ideas would be so assimilated into the author’s, that you would be left with no room to criticise and assess them. You would probably find very little to disagree with the author about.

Many of the same issues resurface when we consider note-taking. As with reading, we will see that it’s important not to tie ourselves to one strategy of note-taking irrespective of the job we have to do. We will see that for different forms of processing there are the most appropriate strategies of note-taking: linear notes for analysis and structure, and pattern notes for criticism and evaluation. Cultivating flexibility in our pattern of study helps us choose the most effective strategy and, as a result, get the most out of our intellectual abilities.

But our problems in note-taking don’t end there. The best notes help us structure our own thoughts, so we can recall and use them quickly and accurately, particularly under timed conditions. In this lie many of the most common problems in note-taking, particularly the habit of taking too many notes that obscure the structure, making it difficult to recall. We will exam ways of avoiding this by creating clear uncluttered notes that help us recall even the most complex structures accurately. Given this, and the simple techniques of consolidating notes, we will see how revision for the exam can become a more manageable, less daunting task.

Finally, if our notes are going to help us recall the ideas, arguments and evidence we read, as well as help us to criticise and evaluate an author’s arguments, they must be a reflection of our own thinking. We will examine the reasons why many students find it difficult to have ideas of their own, when they read and take notes from their sources, and how this affects their concentration while they work.

As we’ve already discovered, our aim here is to identify and extract the hierarchy of ideas, a process which involves selecting and rejecting material according to its relevance and importance. Although by now this sounds obvious, it’s surprising how many students neglect it or just do it badly. As with most study skills, few of us are ever shown how best to structure our thoughts on paper. Yet there are simple systems we can all learn. Some students never get beyond the list of isolated points, devoid of all structure. Or, worse still, they rely on the endless sequence of descriptive paragraphs, in which a structure hides buried beneath a plethora of words. This makes it difficult to process ideas even at the simplest level.

Without clear structures we struggle just to recall much more than unrelated scraps of information. As a result students do less well in exams than they could have expected, all because they haven’t learnt the skills involved in organising and structuring their understanding.

They sit down to revision with a near hopeless task facing them – mounds of notes, without a structure in sight, beyond the loose list of points. This could be described as the parable of two mental filing systems. One student uses a large brown box, into which she throws all her scraps of paper without any systematic order. Then, when she’s confronted with a question in the exam, she plunges her hand deep into the box in the despairing hope that she might find something useful. Sadly, all that she’s likely to come up with is something that’s, at best, trivial or marginally relevant, but which she’s forced to make the most of, because it’s all she’s got.

On the other hand there is the student who files all of her ideas systematically into a mental filing cabinet, knowing that, when she’s presented with a question, she can retrieve from her mind a structure of interlinked relevant arguments backed by quotations and evidence, from which she can develop her ideas confidently. And most of us are quite capable of doing this with considerable skill, if only we know how to.

Linear notes, perhaps, the most familiar and widely used note-taking strategy, because it adapts well to most needs. As we’ve already seen, at university the exams we prepare ourselves for are designed to assess more than just our comprehension, so notes in the form of a series of short descriptive paragraphs, and even the list, are of little real value. Exams at this level are concerned with a wider range of abilities, including our abilities to discuss, criticise and synthesise arguments and ideas from a variety of sources, to draw connections and contrasts, to evaluate and so on. To do all this requires a much more sophisticated and adaptable strategy that responds well to each new demand. It should promote our abilities, not stunt them by trapping us within a straitjacket.

Linear notes are particularly good at analytical tasks, recording the structure of arguments and passages. As you develop the structure, with each step or indentation you indicate a further breakdown of the argument into subsections. These in turn can be broken down into further subsections. In this way you can represent even the most complex argument in a structure that’s quite easy to understand.

Equally important, with clearly defined keywords, highlighted in capital letters or in different colours, it’s easy to recall the clusters of ideas and information that these keywords trigger of. In most cases it looks something like the following:

A Heading

1. Sub-heading

(a)

(b)

(c)

(i)

(ii)

(iii)

e. g.

(d)

2. Sub-heading

(a)

(i)

(ii)

(iii)

97

(b)

(c)

B Heading

1. Sub-heading

(a)

(b)

(i)

(ii)

(c)

(i)

(ii)

e. g.

d)

2. Sub-heading

3. Sub-heading

(a)

(b)

(c)

Needless to say, if we are to make all these successfully, we will have to make sure we organise our work in the most effective way. In the final chapters of this stage we will look at how to reorganise our retrieval system to tap into our own ideas and to pick up material wherever and whenever it appears. We will also examine the way we organize our time and the problems that can arise if we fail to do it effectively. Indeed, if we ignore either of these, we make it difficult for ourselves to get the most out of our abilities and to process our ideas well. Even though most of us routinely ignore it, organisation is the one aspect of our pattern of study that can produce almost immediate improvements in our work.

Here are a number of things you can do to make sure your structure works:

Keywords – choose sharp, memorable words to key off the points in your structure. In the notes on the Rise of Nazism the three main points are not difficult to remember, particularly with keywords, like ‘Humiliation’, ‘Ruins’ and the alliteration of ‘Weakness of Weimar’. But you need other words to key off the subsections, although you don’t need them for every step and every subsection in the notes.

Keying off the main points and the principal subsections will trigger off the rest. Don’t doubt yourself on this, it will – try it. So just choose sharp, memorable words for the principal subsections, words like ‘Treaty of Versailles’, ‘Allies’, ‘Weaken Germany’, ‘Revenge’, ‘Reparations’, ‘Economic slump’, ‘Middle class’, ‘Discontented’ and so on. They don’t have to be snappy and bright, just memorable.

Capitalisation – having chosen your keywords they must stand out, so you can see at a glance the structure of your notes. It’s no good having a structure if it can’t be seen beneath the undergrowth of words. Some people choose to put all their keywords into capitals.

Colour – if you don’t think this is sufficiently prominent, put your keywords in different colours. This doesn’t have to be too fussy – you’re not creating a piece of modern art – but it’s not too much of a bureaucratic task to get into the habit of working with two pens of different colours, one for picking out the keywords and the other for the rest. You will be surprised just how well this works. It’s not unusual to come across people who can still visualise accurately in their mind’s eye pages of notes they took when they were studying for their school-leaving exams many years ago.

Gaps – if the structure is to stand out, your notes must not appear too crowded. To avoid this, leave plenty of gaps between your points. This also gives you the opportunity to add other related things as you come across them in your reading, although you need to do this in such a way as to avoid overcrowding.

Abbreviations – most of us use these, indeed we all tend to create our own personalised abbreviations for those words we seem to use most often. Even so, it’s still surprising how many students look with openmouthed astonishment when you list the standard abbreviations, like the following:

Therefore _

Because _

Leads to A

Increase/decrease ≠ O

Greater than/smaller then ><

Would/should wld/shld

Would be, should be w/be, sh/be

Equivalent =

Not π

Parallel llel

Nevertheless, as your tutors have no doubt told you, although these abbreviations are indispensable in compiling clear, concise notes, they shouldn’t find their way into the final draft of your essay.

If you’ve left sufficient time between reading the text the first time for comprehension, and then reading it for structure, you’re more likely to have a clear, uncluttered set of notes free from all unnecessary material.

You’ll certainly be free of that most time-consuming of activities, taking notes on notes, which many of us are forced to do because our notes are not concise enough in the first place.

Unfortunately, there are many students, even at university, who convince themselves that this is a valuable thing to do; that it’s a way of learning their notes if they rewrite them more concisely. They seem to believe that by committing their notes to paper, they’re committing them to their minds, whereas, in fact, they’re doing anything but that.

Taking notes can be a pleasant substitute for thinking. It’s something we can do on auto-pilot. In fact it can be one of the most relaxing parts of our pattern of study. While we are placing few demands on our mind, it can go off to consider more pleasant things, like the plans for the weekend, or reminiscences about last year’s holiday.

This underlines the main problem in note-taking: most of us find it difficult to be brief. While we have our minds on auto-pilot we’re able to convince ourselves that almost every point, however insignificant, is vitally important to our future understanding. Not surprisingly then, we end up omitting very little, obscuring the structure so that when we come to revision we have to start taking notes on our own notes.

But there’s another reason that’s more difficult to tackle. Most of us, at times, doubt our ability to remember details, so we allow ourselves to be seduced into recording things that ‘might’ be useful in the future.

Inevitably, this results in masses of notes that obscure the main structure, which, as we’ve seen, is the only means by which we can recall them in the first place.

To avoid this we need to remind ourselves constantly of two things: first, that almost certainly we have better memories than we think; and secondly, that we’re not producing encyclopaedic accounts of the subject, in which we record every known fact. To be of any use, notes should be an accurate record of our understanding, of our thinking, not someone else’s.

We can easily lose sight of this when we try to take notes while we’re reading the text for the first time or straight after we’ve read it. We lose our objectivity: all we can see is the author’s ideas and opinions, not our own. We need to give our minds time to digest the ideas and selforganise.

You will find that if you leave time between reading and noting, your mind will have created its own structures out of the ideas it has taken from the text. Then, after we’ve allowed our minds sufficient time to do this, we need to organise ourselves to tap into it, to get our own understanding down on paper, without using the text. Otherwise the author will hijack our thinking and we’ll simply copy from the text without thought. Remember, you can always go back to check on details afterwards.

6. Read the following passage, first for comprehension, and then for analysis and structure. Leave it for a few hours, even a day or so, then go back to it to take out the structure in normal linear notes.

But remember, your aim is to take out the hierarchy of points, the main sections and the way they break down into subsections. Cut out as much unnecessary detail as you can. Where there are examples or explanations, and you think you might need reminding of them, briefly note them in one or two words to act as a trigger for your memory, and nothing more. Choose words or succinct phrases that you know will make the connections to the information you want.

Keep in mind that the most important part of this exercise is to have a clear, uncluttered model of the passage. You will not achieve this if you allow yourself to be tempted into noting unnecessary detail. Your mind will have self-organised in the interval between reading and noting, producing a very clear structure of the passage in your subconscious, so you must develop the skills to tap into this to get an accurate picture of it clearly and simply on paper.

You won't do this if you continually tell yourself that you must note this and this and this, otherwise you're bound to forget them. Don't make it difficult for your mind by doubting its capacity to remember details that don't need to be noted.

Ethics in Business

Over recent years we have seen an unprecedented growth in the numbers of students around the world taking courses in professional and business ethics. Research suggests that in the USA, UK and Canada alone there are at least three million students engaged in philosophy modules as part of their professional degree courses, most of which are in ethics.

More than half of the leading international business schools now feature courses dealing with ethics and corporate responsibility as part of their compulsory syllabuses, according to recent research by the World Resources Institute and the Aspen Institute. In their 'Beyond Grey Pinstripes', a biennial ranking of international business schools, the 91 accredited schools featured in their 2005 report offer 1,074 such courses. And the number of schools requiring students to take them as part of their Individual programmes rose from 34 % in 2001 to 54 % in 2005. Indeed, the top ten schools worldwide each offer around 50 courses.

At the London Business School, ranked by the Financial Times, as the best in Europe, all MBA students are required to take a course in business ethics and responsibility. De Montfort University in Leicester has recently set up an MSc in International Business and Corporate Social Responsibility. The Said Business School at the University of Oxford and the Achilles Group have recently announced the creation of 'The OxfordAchilles Working Group on Corporate Social Responsibility': an initiative designed to bring intelligent debate and practical recommendations to what they describe as an important but underdeveloped field of corporate life.

In the USA a number of business schools have set up specialist centres to meet the increasing demand for ethics-related courses. Georgetown University, for example, established a Business Ethics Institute in 2000 to stimulate empirical and applied research into the issues involved. Boston College has established five distinct institutes, with themes ranging from corporate citizenship and responsible investment to work-life balance and ethical leadership.