Tag: Writers Resources

Developing Student Self-Reflexivity In Secondary Source Research

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Teaching
Library Word Find Puzzle #2
(Photo credit: herzogbr)

Yesterday I wrote about how I introduce secondary source research to students.  Those 7 questions, are, of course, only the starting point for helping students to get the full benefit from engaging with the work of other thinkers.

When our students are working with secondary source material in their writing, we should be encouraging them to use their sources to explicitly support, develop, or refine their own argument.  We sometimes forget that student writers can become part of the wider critical conversation on a topic.  By helping them to use their sources to develop their argument, rather than simply reiterating the arguments of others, we can help them to enter that conversation as well.

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7 Questions to Help Students Use and Understand Secondary Sources

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Teaching
May 2009: Academic Writing & ESL Resources Display
(Photo credit: tclibrary)

The university-level study of English is paradoxically both an individual and collaborative effort, with students developing their own analytical skills while simultaneously learning to think in collaborative ways with tutors and fellow students.  What this paradox demonstrates, of course, is that communicating with those around you plays a significant role in the development of ideas, including communicating with the critical body of material surrounding the topic (even if the line of communication is, in this case, distinctly one-way).

Academic writing, even at the most introductory level, is not created in a vacuum. Indeed, any piece of writing that students produce will be be a conglomeration of voices—some contemporary, some more distant—and their success in that writing will be dependent upon how well they harness this mass.

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4 Tags That Make Sense of It All: Best Practice for Tagging Academic Notes

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Productivity

tags

2013 is already looking like a busy year for me, not least because of an exciting move from the University of London to City University of Hong Kong.  That means new courses, new students, new administrative systems, and a lot of new projects.  Since I have set some time aside this week to take stock and review my plans for the coming year, I wanted to share one of the things that keeps my note-taking organized and ultimately helps to support my work as an academic: a clear, consistent tagging system that I use everywhere I can.

The academic life is a chaotic mixture of teaching, research, service, knowledge transfer, partnerships, publicity, and planning, so it has been important for me to find a way to seamlessly blend these strands.  To this end, every piece of information that I put into Evernote or Things immediately gets these types of tags (I use the hashtag to denote a type of tag–these don’t actually form part of the tag itself):

Context > #Output > #Topic > #X-Ref

Because I use this same tagging system in both my task manager and my note taking software, it is incredibly easy to cross-reference details or to find the information that I need.  Before I explain how these tags function within Evernote and Things, here’s a quick summary of each:

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Tighening Up Some Flabby Prose

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Research

Flabby Writing

With all of this semester’s exam scripts marked and off my desk, I have finally begun to read the books that have been piling up in my Kindle over the past semester.  (On second thought, can eBooks ‘pile up’?  Surely we need a new metaphor in the digital age.)  One that I have particularly enjoyed is Helen Sword‘s Stylish Academic Writing.  Far from an abstracted treatise on writing (as so many advanced academic writing texts are), Sword’s work highlights both the finest and guiltiest features of contemporary academic prose and uses these examples to demonstrate practical techniques for better writing.

The companion website to Sword’s earlier book The Writer’s Diet (unfortunately not available on Amazon.co.uk) offers a diagnostic tool to check the ‘flabbiness’ of prose.  The diagnosis of several pages from a recent article of mine was not entirely positive.  My writing, it seems, is a bit overwhelmed by adjectives and abstract nouns, but, then, so is a great deal of recent academic writing (see below). So my resolution for 2013 is to make my concrete nouns work harder, because up until this point they have been getting a free ride from my favourite adjectives.

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Win One Year of Evernote Premium

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

evernote-ambassador-photo-green-lg

I have been using Evernote since the early days of my PhD (see how I get Kindle notes into Evernote for my teaching), so I was thrilled when they invited me to be their Higher Education Ambassador. Starting today I will get to do lots of cool stuff with them–a bit of traveling, a bit of writing, a bit of speaking.  Awesome!

So, to mark the occasion, I have some great Evernote stuff to give away.  Here’s how you can get it:

To enter, respond to the following question in the comments at the bottom of this post: ‘How do you organize your teaching, research, and writing?  Paper, digital, post-its? File folders, shoe boxes, digital tablets?’  Everyone has their own system–what is yours?

This isn’t just for academics, but for anyone who writes, thinks, doodles, ponders, pilfers, or philosophizes.  And there are some great prizes to be won…

Entries close at 11:59pm GMT on 12 December 2012 and winners will be chosen randomly from all entries on 13 December 2012.  Make sure that you include your e-mail address when you comment so I can contact you.