Good writing is clear writing. To be clear, you need to know the purpose of the writing assignment.

Like audience, purpose in a university setting is problematic.  For most of us, we write in order to get good grades.

While that is a sort of purpose, it is not a purpose that will help us write clearly and communicate effectively.

Here are some purposes that will help us write clearly:

to inform

to show understanding

to persuade

to show results

to entertain

to analyze

Instructors will communicate the purpose of the writing assignment explicitedly, implicitedly, or not at all. Regardless, it is up to you to write with a purpose fully in mind. 

Some writing has more than one purpose; decide the main purpose, and then all other purposes should serve that purpose.

Know your purpose and write with purpose.

Good writing is clear writing. To be clear, you need to know your audience: who is this piece of writing for?

The wrong answer is the instructor.  Although instructors may grade the writing, they are in fact not your real audience. If you think the professor is your audience, you may become unclear by using “big” words to impress them. Big words are not for impression but communication.

You may also feel that you need to impress them with your ideas—ideas you don’t have, which you may be then tempted to borrow” from other places. 

Who is your audience? I believe it is most helpful to think of your audience as your classmates: those who have heard the same lectures, read the same textbooks, and are of similar intellectual level. Write for them. Use words, ideas, structure, and development that will appeal to them.

Know your audience and write for them.     

Creating a schedule that works is key to a successful term. If you feel stuck with a bad schedule:

·       Speak with a faculty student advisor… always a good idea.

·       Take what you need to take; shuffle any electives.

·       Don’t take more than 2 courses with labs per term; a lab is essentially another course.

·       Reduce your course load. Really! Particularly if you are just starting university, you need time to adapt.

·       If there’s a class you’re dreading, think about whether this is the best time to take it.

 Ask yourself, “Am I excited about the term?” If not what can you do to make it  so. 

Starting class in the fall is exciting – and a bit nerve-racking. Making the most of your first classes gets you on track with your work early, and reduces your stress. These tips may help:

▪        Go to class! Even if you just review the syllabus, this is vital information for succeeding in a course.

▪        Review the syllabus so you know what to expect and what to ask.

▪        Arrive (a little bit) early and sit up front.

▪        Take notes – write or type them on your syllabus to keep track of important information.

▪        Be prepared to work – some profs might even lecture.

▪        Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

▪        And, keep an open mind – you never know what you might learn or who you might meet!

Writing Tips: Keeping Things Clear, Part 2

What makes a sentence clear?  As we noted in our previous post, readers tend to respond well to statements that feature a clear, concrete actor and a simple, vivid action.   That’s because such sentences are like miniature stories – they’re easily imaginable.

One way to unleash the power of good, concrete verbs (or action words) in your sentences is to avoid turning them into long, ponderous, abstract nouns – that is, words indicating people, places and things.  Nouns that have been “converted” from being verbs often end in -tion, -ment, or -ance.

Consider this: Identification of the problem involved a set of inquiries with respect to the governance of the province by elected officials.

Ugh.  It’s like government-speak, right?  But drill down into some of those long nouns and you’ll find a vein of clear, vivid gold – in the form of action words (identify, inquire, govern). They identified the problem by inquiring how elected officials are governing the province.

Check out this entertaining TED video from Helen Sword on the dangers of “zombie nouns”: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/beware-of-nominalizations-aka-zombie-nouns-helen-sword

Here are some additional tips for creating a class schedule that won’t keep you up at night:

• Reduce your course load. Really! Lots of students do this. Reducing your course load is an especially wise strategy if you are just starting university – you need time to adjust.
• Make sure you have enough time between classes, especially if you are on the north/main campus as running across campus for an exam is never fun!
• Aim to balance courses that you consider (or expect to be) hard with those that come more easily to you – just remember that easy doesn’t necessarily mean less work.
• And, ask yourself: am I excited about the term? If there is a class you are dreading, think about whether this is the best time to take it.

While most students completed their fall/winter class schedules months ago, many are still ‘shopping’ or ‘juggling’ courses, or generally worrying about the fall term. If you are feeling stuck with a bad schedule:

• First, speak with a faculty student advisor – always a good idea.
• Consider alternative schedules – what are the pros and cons?
• Take what you need to take, and shuffle any electives.
• And, don’t take more than two courses with labs per term – a lab is essentially another course.

Try to fix it now, so your fall term starts off on the right foot.

Writing Tips: Keeping Things Clear, Part 1

Academic essays and reports are serious documents.  But while it’s good to keep your writing formal, it’s also important to make it crisp and clear – that is, to avoid crafting sentences that are unnecessarily vague, wordy or pompous.

What makes a sentence clear?  For one thing, readers tend to respond well to statements that feature a clear, concrete actor and a simple, vivid action.   That’s because such sentences are like miniature stories – they’re easily imaginable.

One way to keep the actor clear is to place it at the front of the statement: that is, to avoid the passive voice unless it’s absolutely necessary.  

Consider this: These findings have been challenged, and a number of alternative hypotheses have been suggested, by Smith (2010).

Heavy, thick, murky – right?  Now consider this: Smith (2010) challenged these findings.  She suggested several other hypotheses, including….

See how the second version comes to life? 

Check out this video from Brian Wasko for a helpful discussion of the passive voice:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_YddWkps-A

Congratulations to Michael Wong! U of A’s top undergraduate student convocated this June and exemplifies the qualities of a ‘strategic learner.’ Wong says he was driven by ‘true motivation’ – enjoying the process of learning: ‘The good grades are nice, but they were never my end goal. It really comes down to being interested in the things I’m studying. I never let myself feel like school work was a chore.’ Read more at http://tinyurl.com/mgmtfvp

How can we challenge our own self-handicapping?

Writing about motivation in elite youth athletes, Larry Lauer, PhD, of the Michigan Youth Sports Institute, describes several strategies for addressing self-handicapping. With self-awareness being an important first step, Lauer’s strategies are adapted here for the university setting:

• Use the right kind of self-talk: Avoid comparing yourself too much to the “competition,” negatively or positively. In university, an overconfident “I’m so much smarter than everyone else” is just as likely as a negative “dumbest in the class” thought to derail your optimal exam performance. Focus on what you can do.
• Know how your mind races: Many athletes and students describe how their minds race when they think about an exam or race, often worrying about the “what if” scenarios or what could be. Make lists of the things you can control and those you can’t. Then think about what you can do to enhance the things you do control – you’ll never be able to control the others, only prepare for them as best you can.
• Develop and Rehearse “proxy thoughts” to keep it real: Negative thoughts can cause your exam stress to skyrocket and impede your ability to focus. Develop alternative positive (and realistic) messages to replace the negative ones – I am prepared, focused, etc.
• Use rhythm and routines to your advantage: not having a predictable routine makes focusing on exams all the more difficult. Find a routine that works for you, and stick to it!

Check out Lauer’s complete article here: http://www.podiumsportsjournal.com/2011/08/25/overcoming-a-tough-competitor-self-handicapping/.

Why do we self-handicap?

Put simply, self-handicappers are their own worst enemies. They select alternatives that impair future performance (Berglas & Jones, 1978), and that specifically impact performance that they value in some way (Zuckerman, Keiffer, & Knee, 1998). Self-handicapping helps us avoid failure, or concerns about failure and success, and often does so with excuses that can be hard to dispute and challenging to unravel.

For instance, when a student is called upon to provide evidence of an ability about which they are uncertain, the student may choose to come up with a number of ways to avoid the situation and preserve their self-esteem. They may prepare a number of excuses as to why they cannot perform the task or why they cannot attend the class or meeting, they may become physically ill with flu-like symptoms, or they may invent a crisis that takes them away from having to deal with the situation. Or they may prepare a credible lie to avoid the truth.

Here are some behaviours students may engage in: 

• procrastination
• drug or alcohol use
• lack of sleep due to cramming for an exam
• over-involvement with friends who have problems
• family crisis (the problem was there before but now is really a problem even though nothing has really changed)
• cleaning their living space before the exam to avoid studying
• long term anxiety that causes the student to seek help at the last minute

Focusing on why we want to avoid a situation and valuing one’s own ongoing effort – rather than external perspectives and demands – can help minimize these self-sabotaging behaviours.

The relationship between increasing study time and improving test performance

Many studies have now confirmed that there a poor relationship between the amount of time a student spends studying and exam out comes. In other words, the more time you spend studying does not necessarily mean your grades will be higher. Of course, it is important to study your course material, but your learning outcomes will be determined by the quality of your studying as well as your versatility in using a wide range of study strategies.Retrieved from:  http://works.bepress.com/nola_perdie/41. 04/18/2013.

Ever wonder why it might take you so long to get your reading/studying done?

An interesting study done using IMs showed that students who answered their messages while reading a 5 page article in a psychology class took almost double the time to read the article than those students who did not respond to any incoming messages.

Although the grades on the test the next day didn’t differ for each to the groups, the amount of time reading and studying did. A number of the students who responded to their messages in class had to spend extra time reading the material to get through it.

HOT TIP: Turn off your phone, email, and other digital messaging systems before you start to read or study. You will take less time to study if you focus on your reading rather than trying to focus on more than one thing at a time.

Is memory like a recording or a video?

We tend to think of memory as a kind of library that holds a record of events and facts the can be retrieved as needed.  But this is not an accurate description of memory at all. Memory reinvents itself all the time. Every time you remember something, you change it a little bit. The reason for this is that your memory is always a mixture of many factors influencing the past event - images, words, feelings, facts, fiction – and so the way you feel today as you recall that past event may be different than the way you felt yesterday about it. Those different feelings or images will change the way you encode the memory. Memory really is a re-collection, not an exact replica of an event.

www.Scientific American.com . Speaking of Memory: Q & A with Neuroscientist Eric Kandel. Retrieved 04/17/2013.

Information Overload: Do You Wonder Why Your Brain Feels Like it’s About to Burst?

Consciousness can be seen as sort of a sensory organ that takes the brunt of the collection of smells, tastes, lights, colors, noises, and other information that enters the brain through our senses. We register about 13 million bits of information every second.  Or stated another way, which is 34 gigabytes of information or the equivalent of 100,000 words daily (which is about ¼ of Tolstoy’s War and Peace). Your short term or working memory can handle no more than seven items at a time.

So memory becomes a process of filtering as well as remembering. If we don’t do a good job of filtering, we run into trouble. You need to know what to pay attention to and cue your brain to do just that. Reduce the amount of information you are taking in by focusing on the task at hand, not several things.

TMI can be disastrous to learning academic information. Think about it – but not while you have your ear buds in your ears, your eyes glued to the latest game on the screen, and your text material up on your computer.

Adapted from:  http://psychologytoday.com/blog/shut-and-listen/201301. Information Overload.

How does stress affect learning?

A little stress heightens your alertness and improves performance on complex tasks. However, as your stress exceeds a certain level, it starts to erode performance. This applies to both students and athletes and explains why it is important to learn to deal with high levels of stress.

How does stress do this?

Stress hormones influence your neural connections in the front of your brain, just behind your forehead, where your ability to reason, plan, problem-solve, regulate emotions and pay attention are located. These functions are important for academic success. How much stress is present will determine how well you function as a thinker.

Blair, C. (September/October 2012). Treating a toxin to learning. Scientific American Mind, 64-67.

The Student Success Centre is open during Spring/Summer 2013, and ready to help students reach their academic goals! A range of workshops and individual appointments are available for graduate and undergraduate students. Visit us at 2-300 SUB or check out our website at www.ualberta.ca/studentsuccess to find out what we're offering.

Feeling overwhelmed by the end of term and upcoming final exams? Plan to be prepared! Student Success Centre undergraduate workshops will help you successfully manage all of these academic demands.

Register now for:
- Final Exam Planning: Saturday, March 16 (1-3pm) OR Tuesday, March 26 (5:30-7:30 pm)
- Exam Strategies: Saturday, March 16 (9am-Noon)
- Preparing for & Writing In-Class Essays: Thursday, April 4 (2-4:30pm)

See full details on our website at http://www.studentsuccess.ualberta.ca/.

Register at 2-300 SUB or via phone at 492-2682.

Let us help you Build a Better Brain!

Be Prepared for midterms with in-depth Exam & Study Strategies workshops. Register now for the February 2 sessions at 2-300 SUB or (780) 492-2682.