Tag Archives: Organization

How to Ask for Help in the Write Site

Where to start:

Here’s the thing you need to know about the Write Site: we are not an editing service here to clean up your paper. We’re writing consultants. That is, our job is to give you feedback to help you improve your writing overall, not just in an individual paper. We like to look at the overall structure, or what we call the “global concerns” of the assignment, before we hone in on grammar mistakes. Our feedback is designed both to address the needs of your submission and to give you an idea of how to make your next paper even better.

With that said, here are a couple of ideas for where to start when considering what kinds of things to put in the “specific questions/concerns” section of your Write Site submission. Forewarning: these suggestions are not going to deal with grammar and formatting. Anyone can ask for help with grammar and formatting. Sometimes, I will admit, grammar and formatting are the main things that need to be addressed in a submission, though usually not. Most of the time, there is something else that needs to be addressed before looking at sentence-level errors. You may or may not already have a sense of what; following these two simple pieces of advice can help you figure out what to ask for to help us help you:

1. Check the rubric for question ideas

Your professor will often attach a rubric with specific requirements for the paper. Some of these requirements will deal with the content you need to include in your essay, but many of them also deal with the professor’s structural preferences. You can look at the rubric for inspiration for questions about argument, support, your thesis statement, audience, and purpose. Your tutors would appreciate your effort even if you take the wording directly from the rubric to check if you’ve done something well.

2. Read up on some of the writing lingo your writing consultants are using

You don’t have to know everything. Heck, you don’t even have to memorize the terms we use here in the writing center, though it wouldn’t hurt you as a writer. Being aware of some of the underlying structures of an essay will not only help you feel more confident asking your tutors specific questions, but will also improve your confidence as a writer. Knowing what’s going on behind the curtain makes the process of writing feel much less slippery. This handout here is a simple explanation of some basic terms (these are what we mean when we say “global concerns”) and a few example questions you can ask in your submissions. Feel free to save it for later and even copy+paste the questions into your submission forms.

That’s it, that’s my advice. Not too complicated, but hopefully you find it helpful. The first step, of course, is making your appointment–for that (and this next bit is specific to TWU students, though the rest of my advice is for anyone thinking of using writing center services at their school), you need to have a WCOnline account set up using your TWU email address. When you create your appointment, you have the option of selecting an online OWL, which is the type of appointment where you send your essay in and we send it back via email with our commentary and suggestions. There’s no live component to this type of appointment, so it’s great for those with scheduling conflicts. We love to have one or two specific questions to focus on during these appointments, since you won’t have a chance to refine your questions during our reading. You can also make an OWLive appointment, which is an online video meeting where we look over your paper with you in real time. It’s good to have an idea of what you’d like to focus on and what kind of feedback you want, but you’ll also have a chance to come up with more questions during your conversation with your consultant. Finally, you can make a live appointment in the Write Site and come to us in person for the same type of real-time tutoring. Again, the Write Site offers a tutoring service, not an editing service, so don’t expect simple revisions. Expect commentary and suggestions for ways to improve your writing and help you along in your process.

Thanks for reading, good luck, and we hope you have a great semester!

Writing an APA Literature Review

Content

A literature review should include more than just a summary of the information you learned from your sources. While summarizing is definitely a rhetorical component of a literature review, it should address each of the following:

What is the problem the researchers are attempting to solve?
What is the research working to change or prove?
What is the current state of research?
What is the synthesis of the investigations discussed in your sources?
How do the sources relate to one another? Address connections, contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies.
What do you think should happen next? In what direction should the research head? What questions remain to be answered? What issues could be clarified?

Organization

Students often organize a literature review source by source, meaning that one paragraph discusses one study, the next paragraph discusses another, etc.

This type of organization is not the most rhetorically effective organizational method and can hinder the kind of critical thinking the literature review is intended to develop.

Simply put, your literature review should include the following sections:

Introduction: states the main topic and explains the scope of the literature review.
Main Body: synthesizes your sources.
Conclusion: summarizes the main body and identifies gaps.

APA Suggested Methods of Organizing Main Body Paragraphs

Sections by Conceptual Categories:

Your sources are likely to be investigating several aspects of the same problem. In a literature review on adolescent depression, for example, you might have a paragraph(s) discussing potential risk factors, a paragraph(s) discussing research on therapeutic options, and a paragraph(s) on the effect of pharmaceuticals. Likely, more than one source will be discussed in each section, and each source will be discussed in more than one section.

Sections by Methodological Similarities:

Group literature together based on how the researcher(s) approached the research. For example, do some of your sources use case studies, others use interviews, and others experiments? If so, this method of organization may work well for you. It allows you to present similar forms of research together, comparing and analyzing what the results mean.

Chronological / Historical Development:

This form of organization presents research chronologically, giving an idea of how the field of study has changed over time. This approach works especially well if a field has been studied over a long period of time or if there have been significant developments in the research.

TIPS:

Find an organizational focus.
Use quotes sparingly, and paraphrase carefully.
Think in terms of synthesis rather than summary.
Describe the search procedures you used.
Keep your own voice!

How to Write a Blog

Know Your Audience

A great blog is both educational and interesting, so when considering your audience, think “Who might need this information?” and “Who might find it interesting?” Typically, the audience is one in the same. Knowing your audience is marketing 101 and blogging is a business. Yes, of course, there are some that still use blogging as a diary, but blogging is also about branding, selling, and educating. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes and consider what information would keep them on your page. Knowing your audience will also help you choose the tone and voice of your post. Blogs are less formal that academic papers, so the language tends to be more relaxed, but it’s important to consider your audience to know how relaxed your language should be. Also, knowing your audience will let you know what information they already know. Millennials probably don’t need a how-to on creating a social media page, but they might need to know how to tweak their pages to gain followers. Knowing who you’re talking to will help you make these subtle changes and create a more focused blog post, which leads us to the next point.

Choose a Topic and a Title

Chances are, you already know what you’re writing about. This is more about being specific. Amateur bloggers will write the content first, end up in left or right field somewhere, and then try to create a title that addresses all their excellent points.

Choosing a narrowed-down, granular topic, then creating a title that clearly conveys your message will focus your blog post and aid in keeping your audience engaged. Make sure your topic is something you find interesting because a lack of enthusiasm will kill your blog. Remember, you are writing for an audience and you don’t want Ben Stein’s “dry eyes” voice to pop into their head while reading your blog. Speaking of dry, choose a catchy title that would make you want to read your blog! You’re writing for like-minded individuals, so use a title that would catch your attention but also tells the audience (or hints) at what your post is about. Making it too vague can be misleading if the reader interprets your title one way but finds out your post is about something else. Go for attention-grabbing or thought-provoking, instead of mysterious.

Write an Outline

Organizing your post will keep the content clear and concise. A 2015 study by Microsoft found that the human attention span has decreased from 12 to 8 seconds. That’s it — just 8 seconds — so you don’t want to lose your audience with an overwhelming amount of content. Audiences often seek blogs for a specific purpose, and no one wants to scroll through an endless amount of content to find what they came for, so plan for between 800-1200 words. Maybe your topic has a lot of information. Consider breaking it down into sections and sub-sections that will make it easier to read. Now, you have your topic, title, and outline, but maybe you’re still struggling to make it interesting to both you and the potential readers. This next element will help move things along.

Use Anecdotes and Images

As mentioned before, blogging (in all its forms) is quite popular, so you don’t want your blog to end up a dead fish in an internet sea of endless blogs. There is an undeniable art and power to storytelling, and that power should be utilized in blogs. When I think of blogs, I think of Scheherazade. Audiences read through the stories she tells the king, night after night, just to get to the real reason they keep reading — to find out if the king is going to kill her that night. Yes, that looong story about grandpa’s farm at the beginning of your favorite blog, just to finally get to the recipe for butter, is the same formula Scheherazade uses, and it’s how some bloggers use anecdotes. It is a way to connect to readers. Also, stories are processed in the brain differently, so pull out some humor or a catchy story to grab and engage readers.

“The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.”

– David Mamet

The use of visual content —gifs, images, videos, etc. — will not only make a blog palatable and interesting, but also leads to an increase in readers. Use visual content thoughtfully with consistent headers and sub-headers, and well-placed images that add to your message.

Don’t Forget a Call to Action (CTA)

Here’s where you tell the audience what to do next and how to lead them to other parts of a blog or other post. For professional blogs, a blogger will tell readers to subscribe to their page or download free content, but other blog CTAs might encourage a reader to action, which is often seen in persuasive writing. For example, if the blog post is about politics, then the CTA might encourage people to vote. Sometimes, a CTA can be as simple as encouraging readers to “Learn More” or “Discover” a new topic. Check out this example of CTAs on this blog post on Electric Lit (see what I did there). You’ll not only see a section “About Recommended Reading” that tells readers to “Sign up” and “join our membership program,” but there are ads along the side to “donate” and “subscribe.” Also, CTAs is where the money’s at. You need to drive readership if you want to attract companies to advertise on your page (because we all love those ads…).

These are just a few ways to get started. Learning to blog will prove useful both academically and professionally because you want someone to see your work. Blogs use search engine optimization (SEO) which helps people find the content and information they need, and since Google isn’t going anywhere any time soon, it’s safe to say that neither is blogging. Think of it this way, when you’re trying to figure out how to use that InstaPot your mother just sent you, are you more likely to read the manual or find a blog or YouTube video? Exactly.

For some examples of blogs, I recommend these websites:

TWU Write Site

Committed to serving students from all educational backgrounds with the goal of fostering growth & maturity in the individual writer