Читать книгу How to Write Brilliant Psychology Essays - Paul Dickerson - Страница 119

One particularly important strand of research has involved using fMRI data to localise psychological function to specific brain regions. An example of this is found in the work of Downing, Liu and Kanwisher (2001), who investigated whether the same regions of the brain were employed in object recognition regardless of the specific object being perceived. A particular interest for Downing et al. …

This looks like it could have been a really good essay – but it has gone wrong from the start. It is not that the content is incorrect or irrelevant – it looks right on target. The problem is that the reader comes to an academic essay with a high chance of asking the two-word question that they (almost) never ask of dictionaries, encyclopaedias or of the instant results to their twentieth Google search that day: ‘so what?’ Don’t write your essay like a dictionary or encyclopaedia entry or a Google factual search result. These are great for conveying information, but your essay needs to do more than that and your introduction sets the scene.

Starting an essay without conveying a sense of what you will cover and why it is relevant to the essay title means that however relevant and accurate your information actually is, your essay will suffer as you have not demonstrated a scholarly mind at work. Your essay, from the introduction onwards, is a medium for demonstrating your thinking about the title and showing that thinking, rather than leaving the reader to try to deduce what sort of thinking there was or wasn’t from flimsy and incomplete evidence.

While the reader of your essay is possibly the most wonderful, engaged and enthusiastic person you can think of – it can be handy to imagine that – whatever their many strengths, they have a tendency to ask ‘so what?’ A well-written essay can meet the ‘so what?’ challenge and prevail. It can even prevent our dear reader(s) from even asking the question.

To write a good introduction, get a draft down first and then read it through as if you were the reader – perhaps the marker – who does not know what’s coming up in your essay, rather than the author, who does. Reading your introduction in this way, ask yourself these three questions:

1 Can you tell from the introduction alone (roughly) what the essay title is?

2 Can you tell (again from the introduction alone) how this essay addresses the title?

3 Can you tell something of the author’s understanding of the issues involved – for example, concerning what issues are debated in this topic and how different perspectives can be characterised?