The Good Writing Guide for Education Students

Dominic Wyse, Kate Cowan

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526414755
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Grappling with grammar? Worrying about referencing? This handy guide is packed with practical advice on how to search for reading materials, structure your academic writing, think critically, reference appropriately and use language effectively. 'Top Tips' throughout the book help eradicate all the common mistakes that bring your marks down. What?s new to the fourth edition?

• two brand new chapters on reading and writing critically
• activities at the end of each chapter to let you check and assess your own writing.

With real life examples of academic work, and plenty of 'dos' and 'don?ts', this is the perfect writing manual for students studying at all levels, and the ideal book to help you get top marks for all your education course assignments.

The Student Success series are essential guides for students of all levels. From how to think critically and write great essays to planning your dream career, the Student Success series helps you study smarter and get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips and resources for study success!

Part I Reading and Thinking

1 Reading Widely

Introduction

The single most important thing that you can do to learn more and to improve the chances of success on your course is to read widely. In order to help you to do that, this chapter gives guidance on the qualities of the different kinds of texts that you will read and explains why some are likely to help more than others. The important concept of peer review is introduced in relation to internet texts, academic journals and books.

Key Topics

• How to get started with reading
• How to identify useful academic literature
• How to refer to media articles

You may have heard stories about people with no previous experience suddenly writing a bestseller. One day they sit down and, without planning, write for about six weeks solid, until a book is complete. With very little effort, they become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Do not believe these stories! When you look into the background of any successful writer, there is a history of writing experience behind them. It may be that they kept a diary, or perhaps they wrote a travel journal for each holiday, or edited a school fanzine. Many writers begin with a lot of hard work getting one short story published in a magazine; some writers have experience as a journalist, a teacher, an academic or some other job that requires regular writing. Whatever their background, all professional writers succeed by very determined hard work, the ability to learn from their failures and the understanding that becoming a good writer takes time.

Thankfully, you do not have to become a professional writer in order to succeed on your course, however there are lessons that can be learned from these people. What all writers have in common is that they have practised the craft of writing. But just as important, they have read widely the kinds of texts that they intend to write. This shows us that if you want to write brilliant assignments, you need to read similar texts. Examples from previous years’ students can be helpful but in particular you should read academic publications written by experts in your subject. This is the kind of writing that is the best model for your own.

As a student on a course, you read for four main reasons:

1. You read to learn more about your subject, sometimes called the field.
2. Texts contain the knowledge that you need as part of your course.
3. Texts give clues that can help you in your writing.
4. Wide reading results in greater success on your course.

The second and fourth points are related. Any formal course assessment is designed to assess the level of your understanding of a particular topic. The knowledge required for the highest levels of understanding is contained in published texts. Therefore, you have to read these texts and show that you have fully understood them to achieve the highest marks.

However, we want to emphasise the third point: you must learn to read like a writer. After you have read a text to understand more about your subject, read it again in a different way. Read it with questions like these in mind:

• Who is the writer’s main audience?
• What issues has the writer chosen to cover?
• How does the writer organise the text?
• How do they use subheadings?
• What particular words and phrases do they use?
• How do they refer to other people’s work?
• How do they build an argument?
• What makes the first sentence/first paragraph effective?
• How do they end the text?
• What kinds of texts are listed in the reference list; which ones shall I read next?

Top Tip

Your understanding will be stronger if you read texts first hand for yourself (the primary source) rather than if you read another text (a secondary source) describing the primary source.

The relevance of wide reading to essays and other academic assignments is perhaps more obvious than to assignments that focus on practical teaching and evaluation. You might question how wide reading improves these teaching evaluations. Your own views and reflections on your practical work are important, but you also need to challenge your opinions by comparing them with the opinions of others. Often, people who publish texts about education have taught for many years in a variety of settings so they are likely to have more experience to draw on than you. This means that they often understand the issues in greater depth. When you read and understand their work, you can benefit from their knowledge and will subsequently understand the subject in greater depth yourself.

Where to start your reading

A tutor’s reading list is a very useful place to start. If the list is good, it will be up to date and will recommend key texts that are at the appropriate level for you. Many universities make these available digitally as ebooks or as links to papers online. Although your tutor will recommend specific texts, the authors of these are likely to have published other texts that might be useful and this can provide a place to start your wider reading. You can do a library search under the author’s name (see Chapter 2) to find other things that they have published. Another option, apart from books and papers, is searching online. But before you decide which kind of text to read, you need to understand about the qualities of different texts.

Key Fact

A paper is an article published in an academic journal. Academic journals are scholarly publications focusing on a particular field or area of study, published on a regular basis (e.g. monthly, quarterly). Some papers are presented at academic conferences prior to publication.

The internet is a vast information resource which features the whole range of texts, including texts that are offensive, texts that are inaccurate, and other texts with a very high level of accurate and useful information. The main weakness of the internet is that it is much easier to publish a web page without having to go through a process which evaluates its quality. The process that many academic publications go through to ensure accuracy and quality is called peer review. For example, if an article is submitted to a journal that is peer-reviewed the article will first be briefly assessed by the editor. Then, if generally suitable for the journal, it will be sent to two or more experts in the field who will read the article and write a report, indicating if they think it is good enough to be published. The editor or editors will then decide on the basis of the reports whether to publish. Ideally, this process should be “blind”: in other words, the referees should not know who has written the paper (some journals even require references to the authors’ own work in the reference list to be disguised or removed).

Key Fact

Peer review is a process which involves experts evaluating documents such as journal articles to ensure that they are accurate, original and significant, and therefore worthy of publication.

The information available on the internet can be particularly useful when you are in the early stages of thinking about a topic. But even at this stage it is important that you are selective about the sites that you use. You need to find sites that are authoritative and trustworthy. Here is a list of the kinds of sites you might come across and some ways that you need to think about them:

• A site published by a single author. This might be the site of someone who is an enthusiast about the topic, and it can be fascinating and full of useful information. The problem is that there is no way of knowing how good the information is.
• A government site. This kind of site is very helpful when gathering information about current initiatives. The information about the government’s own initiatives is likely to be accurate. Government sites very rarely feature criticisms of the government’s own policies so you need other sources in order to develop your critical thinking about them.
• An independent organisation site. This can be very useful to compare with information on government sites. It is important that you find out what the organisation’s purposes are because this will affect the information that they offer and the way they interpret this.
• Sites which summarise topics and provide links to other sites. These can be very useful but the quality of information varies. Wikipedia is fascinating in this regard. Wikipedia does have a peer-review process (anyone in the world!) but you don’t know the expertise of the people doing the reviewing.
• Newspapers and other media sites. These are particularly valuable if the topic of your writing is the media itself or a contemporary issue which is the subject of popular debate. Reporting of research by media sites can be inaccurate and misleading so should be used to take you to original research reports rather than as a citation.

The Times Educational Supplement (TES), which can be found online, is a good example of a potentially useful site. The TES website is a summary of current news in education and allows you to search for past articles. Let’s say that you have been asked to carry out an assignment with the topic of assessment. On 5 July 2016, TES published an article about the government’s assessment results which appears to show that only 53 per cent of pupils attained expected standards in Key Stage 2 tests. The TES article is helpful because it reports on the published test results and contextualises them with information about recent changes to the assessment system. The article makes the important point that the new tests appear to be much tougher, making it harder for children to achieve the “expected standards” rather than necessarily showing a fall in achievement. Although this news article has some useful information, it is still not as rigorous or reliable as a good academic journal article (as you will see in the section below on journals).

Top Tip

Make sure you know the right way to refer to media articles:

• Inappropriate: “Learner (2011) shows that middle-class parents are anxious about young children using technology.” While this may or may not be true, the citation is to a journalist who wrote a newspaper article, not a researcher who has published evidence on the issue.
• Appropriate: “The issue of parent anxiety towards young children using technology has been highlighted in the press in a recent Guardian newspaper article (Learner, 2011).” This comments on the way the newspaper covered the issue rather than using the newspaper as an authoritative source to support a point.

Journals

Let’s look at our topic of assessment from the perspective of a good research journal. Peter Tymms asked the question, “Are standards rising in English primary schools?” and published the answer to this question in an article in the highly regarded British Educational Research Journal. He concluded that independent measures showed that the gains in statutory test results (often called SATs) between 1995 and 2000 were not nearly as strong as some people were claiming (including the government) and that after 2000 there was no further progress (Tymms, 2004). The reason that you can have a higher level of confidence that this information is trustworthy is that the whole article went through the peer-review process. Another indicator of the quality of this particular article is the way that the author draws upon a range of objective sources of evidence, such as the results from standardised tests of reading, writing and mathematics, as part of the argument.

But how do we know that the British Educational Research Journal is a good journal? In the past, we would only know this primarily by making a judgement about the quality of its articles over time. The people on the journal’s editorial board, who are usually listed at the front or end of the journal, are also an important indicator of the quality. An...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• How to Use This Book
• Part I Reading and Thinking
• 1 Reading Widely
• 2 Searching for Reading Materials
• 3 Reading Critically
• 4 Planning for Writing
• Part II Writing
• 5 Structuring Your Writing
• 6 Writing Critically
• 7 Referencing
• 8 Writing a Dissertation
• 9 Proofreading
• 10 Assessment and Learning from Feedback
• Further Reading
• Glossary
• References
• Index