Cassini image of Saturn |
why essays?
You may think that writing essays is irrelevant to a scientific
career. Worse, your school teachers may have allowed you, or – worse
still – even encouraged you to think so. It is
not true. Communication is a vital skill for any scientist,
and indeed for anyone interested in a graduate career. Why is this?
- A great discovery only advances science if
the scientific community knows about it. Tycho Brahe's superb
naked-eye observations of the planets might have had no consequences
whatsoever if his young protege Johannes Kepler had not had access to
them. As it is, by giving Kepler the data needed to formulate his
three laws of planetary motion, they provided one of the main inputs
into Newton's laws of motion and the birth of modern science.
- A great invention only makes you money if
someone builds it. Even commercial research, which will not be
published outside the company, has to be communicated inside it:
someone has to write the patent application, the instructions for the
engineers who are going to build it, and the operating manual for the
people who are going to buy and use it. Dyson doesn't make all his
vacuum cleaners with his own hands!
- Bureaucracy rules. Scientists have
to write grant proposals to fund their research (not to mention
lecture notes and Guides to First Year Astronomy!). Companies need
annual reports. Heads of departments need to report to the University
Vice-Chancellor, or the company Board of Directors. Everybody needs
to write at least one decent job application! In short, effective
writing is an essential career skill for a university graduate,
regardless of discipline.
steps to a good essay
What makes a good essay? Clearly the answer depends on the nature of
the task. An article on the Milky Way Galaxy for a children's
encyclopaedia would be very different from a technical review paper.
The most important criterion is that the essay
should convey its information effectively to its intended
audience. The essential steps to writing a good essay are
therefore:
- Read the brief.
This is akin to the "read the question" advice for examinations: you
will not get a good mark if you do not deliver what you were asked
for. If you are asked for 800-1000 words, don't write only 250; if
you're asked for formal English, don't use colloquialisms; if you're
told to assume that the audience has no access to the lab script,
don't start your description of the analysis with "Using the data
provided in the lab script...".
- Identify the audience.
Who are you writing this essay for? In an assessed essay or report,
the target audience should be specified in the instructions: your lab
reports are to be written for a scientifically trained reader
who is unfamiliar with the particular experiment you are
reporting; the essay you will write in year 3 is intended for a graduate
physicist.
- Decide what you need to say.
Once you have identified the audience, decide what you need to include
in your essay. What background knowledge can you expect your audience
to have already? Which specialised terms need to be explained? How
much technical detail should you include?
- Plan how you're going to say it.
Your essay needs to have a good flow, moving smoothly from one topic
to the next without repetition or sudden changes of subject. Arrange
your material so that it is in a logical order (in lab reports, note
that this may not be the order of the lab script – sometimes the order
that makes the best use of your time in the lab is not the most
logical order scientifically). Make sure that you have an
introduction setting out the motivation
for what you are going to do, and a conclusion
explaining the significance of the
results.
You will probably want to write down your plan and use it as a
checklist when you write your essay. With experience, some people can
plan essays in their heads, but this is not a good strategy for a
beginner.
- Write a first draft.
Don't expect to come out with the perfect essay on the first attempt:
assume that your first shot is going to be a draft, and leave time
before the deadline to revise it. Ideally, get someone else to read
your draft: your tutor will usually be happy to do this, if you
give him sufficient time (handing your tutor a draft at 10 am and
expecting him to give it back to you at lunchtime is not good for
tutor/student relations). If your tutor is the person who will have
to mark the final answer, he or she may ask you to give your draft to
someone else, such as a lab demonstrator; don't be offended by this –
it's done in the interests of fairness, so that your essay will be
marked on the same basis as everyone else's.
plagiarism
Work which is assessed as part of your module grade must be
your own original work. In the case of an
essay or lab report, this means that you must not copy material,
exactly or nearly exactly, from another source: the introduction of
your lab report must not be copied from the lab script. You can use
the information from another source, provided you reference it
properly, but you must not use someone else's words – doing so is
plagiarism, and is not only dishonest and unethical, but also
illegal (violation of copyright).
The department has produced offical
guidelines on plagiarism, based on the University's regulations on
the use of unfair means in examinations. Read
these guidelines, and make sure you understand what they mean –
if in doubt, consult your tutor. The University also provides an Information Skills Tutorial on plagiarism: work through this, especially slides 8-15, before writing your essay.
assessment
Essays and reports are normally assessed according to three criteria:
- Adherence to the brief. Does the
essay deliver what was asked for? Is it at the right level for the
specified audience?
- Content. Does the essay contain the
necessary material? Does it not contain unwanted material,
such as extraneous waffle or unnecessary tables of data? Is the
balance between sections right? Is the material factually correct?
Is it well explained, at the appropriate level?
- Language and style. Is the essay
written in good English, with no spelling mistakes or grammatical
errors? Is the English style appropriate? Does the essay read well,
with a good structure and flow?
There is some overlap here: both "necessary content" and "appropriate
style" depend on the brief, so often "Adherence to brief" will not
appear as a separate category but will be implicitly included in the
marking criteria for the other categories. "Content" may be
subdivided: for example, in a lab report the presentation of the data
is very important, so it may well be listed as a category in its own
right. The exact balance of marks between categories depends on the
nature of the assignment: for example, if you are asked to write
something very specific, such as a book review or a Nature 'News and
Views' article, the marks allocated to appropriateness of style will
be higher than usual.
Please note that you will lose marks for poor English: spelling
mistakes, bad sentence structure and inability to use apostrophes are
not acceptable at this level. There are two reasons for this:
- Grammatical errors can often make the meaning of a passage unclear
or ambiguous. Scientific writing is about conveying difficult
concepts as clearly and accurately as possible, so anything that
reduces clarity is undesirable.
- Poor writing style reflects badly on the writer. It makes you
look uneducated, and/or careless and sloppy, neither of which inspires
confidence in the reader. This may have consequences in later life:
if a company personnel office receives 100 applications for a graduate
post, and has to whittle these down to a shortlist of 10 for
interview, a covering letter that is full of spelling mistakes and
grammatical errors makes a good excuse for consigning that application
to the 'reject' pile.
If you have dyslexia, or your first language is
not English, we will take this into account if we know about
it. Make sure that the Departmental Office has copies of the
relevant documentation, and put a note on the cover of any assessed
work handed in. If you have not been diagnosed as dyslexic, but the
person who marked your essay suggests that you might be, don't take it
as a personal insult – see the Disability and Dyslexia
Support Service to arrange a dyslexia test. If you are
diagnosed as dyslexic, this will be taken into account in your
assessment throughout your university career – for example, you will
be given extra time in examinations.
If you have difficulties with English, whether caused by dyslexia,
not being a native speaker, or simply poor teaching at school, do make
use of the University's Writing Advisory
Service, run by the English Language Teaching Centre. Take your
draft essay, or the mangled remains of one that did not fare well at
the hands of the marker, to your WAS appointment and a specialist
writing tutor will go through it with you and help you to improve your
skills.
laboratory reports
Much of the above applies equally to a formal laboratory report:
you should read the brief, identify your audience, decide what you're
going to write, and plan your report; you will be assessed on
adherence to the brief, content, language and style. Specific
instructions on writing a laboratory
report, together with an example, will
be handed out in the lab sessions, or can be downloaded as pdf files
by clicking on the links.
|
