Rapid Academic Writing
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Rapid Academic Writing Royce Kimmons & Richard E. West Version: 0.65 Built on: 05/24/2021 12:21pm This book is provided freely to you by CC BY: This work is released under a CC BY license, which means that you are free to do with it as you please as long as you properly attribute it. Table of Contents Licensing Information ................................................................................................................ 4 Contributing Authors .................................................................................................................. 5 1. Let's Get Writing ............................................................................................................................ 6 1.1. The 5 C Guidelines .............................................................................................................. 7 1.2. How to Write Articles Quickly and Expertly .................................................................. 13 2. Critical Thinking ........................................................................................................................... 22 2.1. Critical Thinking in the Classroom ................................................................................. 23 2.2. Necessary and Sufficient Conditions ............................................................................. 34 2.3. Good Logic .......................................................................................................................... 40 3. APA for Novices ........................................................................................................................... 56 3.1. Hoops and Barriers ........................................................................................................... 57 3.2. Crafts and Puzzles ............................................................................................................ 76 3.3. The Papers Trail ................................................................................................................ 99 3.4. The Fine Art of Sentencing ............................................................................................ 126 3.5. Hurdles .............................................................................................................................. 144 3.6. Small Stressors ................................................................................................................ 162 4. Literature Reviews .................................................................................................................... 177 4.1. Introduction to Literature Reviews .............................................................................. 178 4.2. What is a Literature Review? ........................................................................................ 188 4.3. How to Get Started ......................................................................................................... 202 4.4. Where to Find the Literature ........................................................................................ 212 4.5. Evaluating Sources ......................................................................................................... 225 4.6. Documenting Sources .................................................................................................... 233 4.7. Synthesizing Sources ..................................................................................................... 240 4.8. Writing the Literature Review ...................................................................................... 244 4.9. Concluding Thoughts on Literature Reviews .............................................................. 252 Technical Tutorials ......................................................................................................................... 262 Constructing an Annotated Bibliography with Zotero ...................................................... 263 Extracting Resource Metadata from a Citation List with AnyStyle.io ............................ 274 Exporting Zotero to a Spreadsheet ...................................................................................... 278 Appendices ...................................................................................................................................... 279 Back Matter ..................................................................................................................................... 280 Author Information ................................................................................................................. 281 Citation Information ............................................................................................................... 284 Rapid Academic Writing 3 Licensing Information This is a free textbook. It represents hundreds of hours of scholarship, writing, and editing work. It is licensed under a CC BY 3.0 (Attribution) license. This means that you are generally free to share and adapt the contents of this book as long as you provide proper attribution. Some embedded content in this book (such as YouTube videos) may not be licensed in the same way as the book generally. Before using embedded media content in your own project, please check the license on the specific resource. Since this book contains a collection of resources, not all are licensed in the same way. Please refer to available licensing information on individual chapters if provided, because licensing on individual book elements (e.g., chapters, videos) overrides the boilerplate license for the book. Rapid Academic Writing 4 Contributing Authors This book includes the work of a number of contributing authors who either actively contributed to the book or provided openly-licensed resources, which were repurposed or remixed for inclusion. These authors included the following: Rapid Academic Writing 5 1 Let's Get Writing Rapid Academic Writing 6 1.1 The 5 C Guidelines Prioritizing Principles for Good Academic Writing Royce Kimmons Vector Design by Vecteezy.com Producing good academic writing is a difficult skill to master, and writing for an academic audience is different than writing for other audiences. As an academic writer, you must approach topics differently than you might as a journalist or creative author, and you must emphasize certain skills, such as writing clearly, and ignore other skills that you might have been taught in other contexts, such as using expressive imagery. To introduce you to this world of academic writing, in this chapter I suggest that you should focus on five hierarchical characteristics of good writing, or the “5 Cs” of good academic writing, which include Clarity, Cogency, Conventionality, Completeness, and Concision. I will now explain each of these in more depth and then discuss tensions between them in writing for different academic audiences. Clarity "Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science." — Janna Levin Many of us were taught in writing courses that ambiguity and obfuscation of meaning are laudable, because they make our writing seem more complex, deep, and witty. And many of our favorite novelists likely use ambiguity and other tricks to make their writing seem mysterious and complex. Rapid Academic Writing 7 In academic writing, though, these practices simply suggest that you don’t know what you’re talking about. For academics, writing is a way of uncovering truths and realities of the social and physical world, so we should say what we mean. We should make it clear, and say it so that it is impossible for our audience to misunderstand. If your imagined reader ever has to squint her eyes and muse “I wonder what the author really meant by this,” then you have failed. If your imagined reader ever smiles to herself and chuckles at your brilliant wordplay, then you have failed. This is not to say that academic writing must be joyless and stodgy. It can be witty. It can be deep. But academic depth and wit come from the ideas portrayed through the words, not the words themselves. Too often, writers use ambiguity to hide sloppy thinking and beautiful language to hide destitute ideas. If you say something that could potentially be misunderstood, explain it. If a simpler word will do in place of a more complex one, then use the simple word. Don't be afraid of laying out complex ideas across multiple sentences or paragraphs, but use the space available to you to open up your mind to your reader — what exactly you are thinking, how you are thinking about it, and why. If you use jargon, technical terms, or initialisms, then you should define or operationalize them. Defining a term means that you are relying upon someone else’s explanation of what the term means and are sticking with it (e.g., “Marwick defines ‘social media’ as…”). Operationalizing a term means that you are using a term that might mean multiple things but you are deciding to only use it in a very finite and specific manner (e.g., “In this paper, I use the word ‘engagement’ to mean…”). In the case of initialisms, no reader should be expected to know what a PBL, SNS, LMS, CMS, or PBIS is by virtue of the letters themselves, and often even technical initialisms might have multiple meanings (e.g., PBL in education might refer to “project-based learning” or “problem-based learning”). So, when you use initialisms in your writing, define them at the outset (e.g., “positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS)”). If you