I hope to see you there.

Don’t forget you can email me at msu.grad.tutor@gmail.com to set up an appointment, ask questions, or receive writing assistance over email.

I hope that you will contact me this semester to assist you with your writing projects.  You can reach me at msu.grad.tutor@gmail.com for appointment requests and general queries.

If you don’t visit campus or simply prefer it, online tutoring is an option for you.  Email me to learn more.

Have a great semester!

If you’ve just finished your first year in a two-year Masters program, the summer is the perfect time to start really researching your thesis topic. Even if you’re two years into your PhD program, working through the summer is still a great idea. Yes, of course, you deserve a break. That’s why my plan for summer research is perfect for you: it’s a minimal effort with maximum return plan.

Research is often the most fun part of a big writing project for a lot of students and professionals. While writing is intimidating for a lot of us, research usually is not. What I mean by research is document research: looking for articles and books on your thesis/dissertation/paper project, not lab or field research. Lab and field research is another topic altogether (and still fun, I’ve heard). Book, Internet, and article research is great because you get to experiment with search terms and discover new information about your topic. You can discover how varied your very specific topic area is. Research is also a simple way to ease into working over the summer because the first step involves reading abstracts only. Abstracts are short and useful. They are not intimidating because they are concise. Abstracts are the perfect first step in a summer research plan.

For the most part, your summer can be spent looking for pertinent articles and books by simply reading abstracts, saving the link or printing the article (or securing the book from the library) and placing links or articles in a folder on your desk or computer. Easy, right? If you spend two months compiling research and one month reading through it, you are well on your way to completing your research all in one summer, depending on your project’s length or complexity.

Once you’re ready to scan through your research, make sure you take some brief notes and include page numbers and quick thoughts on how this research supports your argument or project. These little notes will be immensely useful come writing time. They’re also useful because your own notes can help you see trends in research and possible gaps that exist. These trends or gaps can influence your own work (the direction it takes) or can be worth mentioning in your literature review or concluding statements. Don’t forget to write out citations for books or materials you might need to return to their owner. Writing out the reference entry now is much easier than hunting down the information when your work is almost due.

While the summer is definitely the time to relax, it’s also the perfect time to get some research done. So enjoy the summer and enjoy your work.

Review of Literature
A review of literature for a thesis or dissertation is a common writing assignment and not always the simplest for students.  While writing the review of the literature you’ve researched to become familiar with your topic, keep these few tips in mind: 1. Remember that the review is your opportunity to show the reader that you’ve researched thoroughly and know what information is out there about your topic; 2. A lit review is often organized thematically, so look for trends in research to begin your organizational plan; 3. You still need to include topic sentences and transitions in the review to keep the reader engaged and following your logical progression.   Here is a link to the University of Wisconsin Madison Writing Center’s article on writing a review of literature.  It is a general article, but offers useful tips for any discipline. http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/ReviewofLiterature.html

Writing without judgment
A huge mistake writers make is agonizing over every little sentence too early in the writing process. You must learn to initially write without judgment so that you can get through drafting. It will never be perfect the first time. It will always take multiple drafts—even for seasoned, professional writers. But without that first, imperfect draft, you’ll never have anything to revise.

Writing is Revision
Sound familiar? This is a common saying of writing teachers and I’ve found it to be very true. Writing, like other academic disciplines, is a skill that can be mastered. Too often writing is considered an art (which it certainly can be) and that makes it feel inaccessible to a lot of us–which can make getting started even harder. Revision is a big part of producing an effective and successful document, and that is your goal. Revising a document means asking peers or advisers (or the writing tutor!) to read your draft and ask questions about it. Their questions and concerns will hopefully lead you to write stronger arguments with more effective support. Reading our own work critically is difficult and something you will get better at the more you practice. Try to be open to constructive criticism of your own work and the revising process will get easier.

Take a break
Possibly the best part of the writing process is when you get to take a break from your writing. Some students forget this necessary step in the writing process. Often, a break of a few days or even a week (or more, if you can afford it) once or twice during your process–once before your last major revision and once before final proof-reading–can instantly improve your mood, your revision speed, and your engagement with the material. Taking a break isn’t lazy and it won’t lead to you becoming disengaged with your project, either. In all likelihood, taking a break will only improve your work once you get back to it. Coming back to a project with fresh eyes and a sharper mind is the best thing you can do for yourself and your work–and it certainly makes spotting all those little typos a whole lot easier.

Lead with your own voice
It’s a common mistake for writers to begin a paragraph with a source–either another person’s idea or a quotation–rather than our own.  Beginning a paragraph with a source often means you haven’t transitioned into the paragraph or offered the reader a topic sentence (a sentence that tells the reader what the paragraph will be about).  It’s important to begin and end paragraphs with your own words, voice, and ideas because the paper is yours.  Writers use sources to support their own arguments; you are the star of your writing, not your sources.

Hope these quick-tips are useful. Good luck with your writing!

One use is list-making, which a lot of us do in professional documents. Ex.: Oscar Hijuelos’s work evokes feelings of loneliness, love, and nostalgia.

Another use is when a sentence begins with an introductory element. Ex.: In this sense, Hijuelos is a genius. OR However, most critics do not agree.

A comma is also used when a sentence begins with a dependent clause (a fragment on its own) followed by an independent clause (a full sentence all on its own). Ex.: Although she did not like to write, she wrote every day.

A set of commas is used when a writer offers information that is cursory to the sentence’s thought. Ex.: Both bull and cow elk, which frequent Mammoth Springs, reside throughout the Yellowstone ecosystem.

So here’s a link with more examples and more in-depth explanations: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_comma.html

Enjoy!

1. Start researching early. As early as possible, really, because this will give you more time to barter with inter-library loan or beg other students via email for their books. The more you research, and the earlier, the more refined your argument will be and the faster and easier the writing will go. If you have lots of research to choose from, supporting your argument becomes monumentally simpler.

2. Buy or inherit many folders, binders, post-it notes of various colors, and a black marker. Divide your research into categories by author (either who wrote it or who it’s written about), subject, or type of research (article, medical study, interview, equations, charts and graphs, etc.). Label everything. Color-code chapters or paragraphs in books with post-its for quick access to the information. Do this because it saves time and anxiety when you’re looking for a particular piece of information to show to your advisor or to insert into your draft. Tip: often other students or GTAs have more leftover folders or office supplies than they know what to do with, so ask around before purchasing some. This saves you money and helps out the environment at the same time.

3. Meet with your advisor as often as you can both handle. This step keeps you working toward your goal because you have to have something to show your advisor at each meeting. It’s also helpful because it keeps your advisor updated on what, exactly, you’re working on, which can save you valuable time if the scope of your work gets too big because he/she can pull you back.

4. Take notes at each meeting with your advisor. When you’re in that room, everything he/she is saying makes perfect sense and seems easy enough to remember, but once you’re back on your own, it’s hard to recall with all those other thoughts rolling around in your head. Show up to meetings with questions and write down the answers. Keep all your notes in the same place, in the same notebook, even.

5. Make a list of all your due dates and post it above where you usually work. My list was above my computer desk. This helps you be realistic about revisions and work to be completed because your time frame is always readily available. I also wrote all due dates in my planner (using one color for this particular project) so I saw them all the time. This kept me working instead of slacking.

6. Try to remember those stress-buster strategies from undergrad and use them. Remember during finals in undergrad when student services was offering all of these strange events to supposedly bust your stress? They were events like movies, massages, going out to eat, getting a drink (OK, that is a new addition, probably).  Take advantage of Bozeman and do some of those things. You won’t necessarily forget about your project while you’re out, but you’ll succeed in being a person for a night out with friends and that is a big stress buster during grad school. Yes, you want to work hard and do well, but you don’t want to look back at grad school and remember all the good times you missed out on.

7. Remember that the work will most likely get done. You’ve made it through grad school so far, right? Most classes want you to write or complete a big project, so just think of your thesis as four classes put together. Doable, in pieces. Stay positive and don’t let your work crush your spirit. You can do this. MSU didn’t admit you into one of their programs because you’re a long-shot; they believe in you, so you should believe in yourself.

In undergrad, a professor told me that grad school was the hardest I’d ever work and the most fun I’d ever have. While this was perhaps hyperbole, his advice turned out to be fairly accurate. As graduate students, we work very hard. It’s easy to forget the fun part when every move you make seems like it could affect your academic future. Of course you should work hard, but don’t forget to live your life outside of school, either.

So, if you like these abbreviations, you may not like my next advice: Drop them whenever possible. Why? Two reasons.

First — and pardon me for being blunt here — using abbreviations where you could use words is lazy. Rather than deciding how best to incorporate those words or examples into your sentence, you chuck them in between a pair of parentheses and let an abbreviation do your work. Take the time to do it right, for Pete’s sake.

Okay, a more serious addition to the “lazy” factor is that lazy things are often a gateway to addiction. What is mean is, once you get a taste for abbreviations, you may decide to sprinkle them liberally throughout your writing. When a reader comes upon too many of these in a document (and I would say that more than one in every two pages is too much) the reader starts getting distracted by the abbreviations. And attracting attention is the opposite of what abbreviations are supposed to do.

My second reason for advising against Latin abbreviations harkens back to what H.W. and F.G. Fowler wrote about them in their classic The King’s English, “No one should use these who is not sure that he will not expose his ignorance by making mistakes with them.” In other words, writers (and readers) are often confused about what they mean. Take for example two of the most abused Latin abbreviations, i.e. and e.g.

Most people use the two interchangeably to mean “for example.” But that’s not exactly correct. The abbreviation e.g. stands for exempli gratia, which means “for example,” so you’re good to go on that front. However, i.e. stands for id est, which means “that is” — not quite the same.

So, if you must use these Latin abbreviations, use them correctly. A good way to remember how is to think of i.e. as standing for “in effect” or “in other words.” Then think of e.g. as “example given.” Do this, and you’ll never confuse the two again.

Oh, and as one last style note: neither i.e. nor e.g. gets italicized, even though they are foreign language terms. That’s because they’re used so widely in English these days that we just drop the italics.

Approaches to Writing

Or, you can watch it here.

Writing is both a product  (the thesis, dissertation, or paper you intend to turn in)  and the process you use to create that product. Student writers, however, often focus so hard on the finished product that they forget the process, which is unfortunate. The tyranny of the finished product replaces the joy of discovery that accompanies the writing process.

It doesn’t have to be this way. This document provides a refresher on the writing process (or an introduction to those of you who have never heard of the writing process before). Keep the process in mind, and you’ll never get stuck or lost in a long writing project again. And, most importantly deadlines will hold less power over you because you will face those deadlines well prepared.

A note before getting started: I break the writing process into six steps: brainstorming, organizing, outlining, drafting, revising, and proofreading. Other people divide the process differently. If you search the Web for the writing process, you’ll find the stages under different names, but the idea behind the process will be basically the same.

Brainstorming

This first step helps at two times, when you’re generating a thesis statement and after you’ve got your thesis statement and are looking for ideas for the paper itself. Basically, you write down as many ideas as you can. Don’t worry about whether they’re related to your topic; you’ll sort out the unrelated items later. For now, generate a mass of content that you can work with.

Practical tips: Start a new word processor file and just type. Put new ideas on a new line. Keep things short and move on quickly. Don’t second-guess yourself or go back to delete. You can also do this on paper, note cards, or even a typewriter (if you happen to have one of those).

Another approach: stream-of-consciousness writing. Set a timer for, say, 10 minutes. Then sit down and start typing sentences, anything that comes to mind about your subject. Just don’t stop, not for anything. This activity primes the pump of words; so even if you run out of ideas, don’t stop typing. Trust that your mind will wend its way back around to the subject.

Organizing

Once you have completed your brainstorm, you’ll be left with a mess of ideas that came from a number of sources and tend in a number of directions. This is the time for organization.

Wheat from the Chaff — In the organization stage, you must separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Look through your ideas with a paper-wide perspective. Determine which notes and ideas have absolutely nothing to do with your chosen topic and put those aside (but don’t throw them away; they might just become useful later).

Further Refinement — Now that all the ideas in your stack have something to do with your paper’s topic, it’s time to refine them. The first step is to sort them into piles (or if you’re working on a computer files) to keep them separate. For example, if you’re working on Shakespeare’s comedies as your general topic, you might want to separate your ideas into piles by play.

Grouped by Subject — As you might have guessed, the next step really just takes the refinement a step further. You now take the stacks or groups of ideas you’ve made and separate them into individual topics–topics that could possibly become paragraphs in the drafting process.

Last Note — The important thing to remember about this organization process is to never throw any of the ideas away or delete them completely from the computer. Paper topics are like living things: they change and evolve. You never know when an idea might suddenly become relevant to the paper again. So if you’re doing your organization with note cards, hold onto the ones that don’t fit. If you’re organizing on computer, throw all the spare ideas into a separate file. Just make sure they don’t wind up in the trash.

Outlining

Outlines are like blueprints. They represent a plan, a direction. They bestow confidence on the writer, because you know that someone somewhere had a plan and decided to put that plan into writing for you to follow. The problem, though, is that you are both the “architect” and the “builder” of your paper. There is, sadly, no one waiting to draft your outline for you.

But, if you’ve taken the time to craft a workable thesis or dissertation topic, gone through the brainstorming process, and spent some time organizing your ideas in to manageable groups, then writing the outline will not be difficult.

What is an Outline? — This is the hardest thing to describe, because for those who have been introduced to the concept of outlines, forming one’s almost as easy as breathing.
For those completely unfamiliar with outlines, it is enough to know that an outline is a hierarchical way of organizing ideas. Usually, they are organized with numbered or lettered headings. Subheadings are indented to show that they are subordinate to the ideas that come above them. An outline’s headings (ideally) come in the same order as the concepts will appear in the paper.

Why use an Outline? — The benefits of using outlines come from the ability to look at a paper’s major ideas at a glance. This layout makes it very easy to see if the order of ideas and concepts is (for lack of a better word) logical. If you are missing some connective material or ideas that help the reader get from point A to point B, the outline will help you see it.

An outline also helps you see how much material you’ve amassed under each heading, which then lets you see whether each section has an appropriate amount of research and support. For example, if one section of your outline is drastically shorter than all the others, that section might be a candidate for further research (or even deletion, in some cases).

Last Words — An outline can be an invaluable tool throughout the drafting process. In fact, some writers (myself included) like to draft directly from the outline, typing its general ideas and sentence fragments into full sentences and paragraphs before cutting/pasting them into a new document.

Drafting (Actually Writing the Thing)

You sit down and write it.

Worried? Well, you have a right to be. I’ve made it sound far easier than it actually is, haven’t I? Isn’t there something missing, like all the anguished hours in front of the keyboard, looking for the right word, massaging your sentences so they make sense?

No, not in the drafting stage! In the drafting stage, all you worry about is putting words to paper (or screen). You don’t worry about grammar, spelling, sentence structure, or readability. You just get it all out there.

Okay, How? — In the drafting stage, if you’ve managed to divorce yourself from the paralyzing worry about grammar and all those other nitpicky things, the largest concern becomes time management.

Find a system that works for you, whether that means getting up an hour early every day to write or setting aside specific times throughout the day to write. Whatever you do, find time to work on your project every day because this is the easiest stage in which to procrastinate. And deadlines have a way of creeping up quietly.

But… — Okay, there’s something of a catch to drafting. Some writers have a tendency to think that, if you’ve done enough pre-writing and planning, the draft will write itself without any problems whatsoever.

As Kate Turabian points out in A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, this ignores the value of drafting as a process of discovery. “Indeed,” she writes, “you experience one of the most exciting moments in research when you discover yourself expressing ideas that you did not know you had until that moment” (71). Author E.M. Forster put it another way: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Don’t think that drafting is automatic. Do think that it is something to do smoothly and without too much concern about the particulars of language.

Revising

So you’ve got a paper to work with, now it’s time to polish it into something you’re proud to turn in.

When I used to teach this step to college freshmen in composition class, I made a point of saying that it should take longer than all the other steps combined. For a thesis or dissertation, that certainly doesn’t hold true, especially for those who’ve spent the past two years in a lab or in the field gathering data. However, revising should still take considerably longer than drafting.

How is that possible? Well, if you didn’t focus on grammar and the minutiae of writing when you put the draft together, then you’ve probably got quite a mess on your hands: sentences that don’t fit together, ideas that trail off into nothingness, missing citations, notes to yourself, new ideas that need more work, sections you found that didn’t really work… The revision process is where you iron all this out, and it is the step when you are most likely to search out the help of someone like a graduate writing tutor.

What Should I Look For?

• Missing content
• Efficient and logical paragraph order
• Extra words, spots where you can simplify
• Word choice (i.e. Do you really want to say “lift” when you mean “elevator”?)
• Tone, making sure the paper “sounds” the way you want it to
• Check on your introduction, thesis statement, and conclusion
• Streamline the keywords and terms that run through the document
• Clearly mark sections and chapters
• Make sure each section or chapter relates to the one that came before (by use of transition words, sentences, or paragraphs)
• Each part of the paper should contribute to the paper’s “mission.” When in doubt, ask yourself: What is this sentence/paragraph/section/chapter doing for my paper as a whole?

Most importantly, after you’ve been on this project for hours and hours, day after day, walk away for a while. Get some distance from the paper and come back to it with fresh eyes.

When you come back to the document, try paraphrasing it. By that, I mean take the first few sentences of each section or paragraph and create a summary out of them, paraphrasing your own words. Does that paraphrase “hang together”? If not, more revisions might be in order.

Proofreading

Now, finally, it’s time to proofread your thesis or dissertation and find those nasty mechanical and grammatical errors. These include punctuation, typos, spelling, formatting, and any other details.

Conclusion

Having a process to follow bestows confidence. It helps you know that someone somewhere has been through your situation before and has survived or at least finished her project. The process can give you a direction to go if you’re lost and can reassure you if you’re struggling.

What are they?
Paragraphs are, of course, blocks of text, often with their first lines indented or set off from other blocks of text. They developed naturally over time as a way to make texts more readable (Imagine being a medieval scholar and having to read an entire manuscript without any paragraph breaks.) As writers and printers adopted paragraphs as a standard, several guidelines for paragraphing evolved.

The basic rule is “one idea per paragraph.” Think of paragraphs as micro-essays, five (or so) sentences long. They begin by introducing the theme or idea to be discussed then support that idea with several facts or several sentences of analysis. Then the writer provides the reader with a closing sentence that extracts the reader from the current paragraph and leads him into the following ‘graph.

Some of the words you’ll hear bandied about when it comes to paragraphs are unity and cohesion. These terms really just restate the “one idea per paragraph” idea.

An approach to building unified paragraphs
Now, how does a writer actually do this? The Perdue University Online Writing Lab recommends what they call “local bridges” and “verbal bridges.”

In a paragraph using logical bridges, ideas and topics are carried over from sentence to sentence, and those sentences are constructed in parallel form — meaning that they have similar grammatical patterns. For example, a few sentences might begin with “because” clauses or end with “which” clauses. The writer would carry that pattern throughout the paragraph for its rhetorical (style) effect.

In a paragraph using verbal bridge, keywords or synonyms connect sentences, or else the writer uses pronouns throughout the paragraph to refer back to a major idea mentioned at the beginning. For example, the writer might repeat a vocabulary term throughout for emphasis, establishing a rhythmic pattern that aids readability.

It is also important to remember that these two ideas, verbal and logical bridges, are not mutually exclusive. A writer can use either or both in a single paragraph; just make sure not to overload the paragraph with style at the expense of facts and figures.

Paragraph development
If you spent too much time around writing tutors and writing centers, more than likely you’ll hear something about “paragraph development.”

Basically, a “developed” paragraph has enough information in it to justify its existence. Such a paragraph adds valuable, new information to a paper or thesis that hasn’t necessarily been mentioned in that way previously. An undeveloped paragraph skims the surface, mentioning an idea without giving any useful or meaningful information about it, or it repeats information unnecessarily.

Developed paragraphs are like show and tell for your research; they move the paper toward its conclusion gracefully. Undeveloped paragraphs contribute little to the structure of your paper they are good candidates for deletion.

Perdue lists several method to ensure that your paragraphs are developed:

• Use examples and illustrations
• Cite data
• Examine what others say in quotes and paraphrases
• Use an anecdote or story
• Define terms
• Compare and contrast
• Examine causes and reasons
• Examine effects and consequences
• Analyze the topic
• Describe the topic
• Offer a chronology of an event

Paragraph length
Perdue recommends that paragraphs be of roughly equal length. They call this a “balanced” page or paper. While this is a good technique for making sure that all your paragraphs are well-developed, it’s kind of like telling a student that they absolutely cannot start a sentence with the word “because” — meaning it’s a pseudo rule, one that comes not from a grammatical or syntactical rationale but from a desire to teach proper technique.

Keeping with the example, students who begin sentences with “because” often forget the main subject-predicate section of the sentence, resulting in a fragment. Rather than have a paper full of fragments, instructors instead ban “because” as a sentence starter. Perdue’s recommendation runs along the same logical lines. Asking students to write paragraphs of roughly equal lengths guarantees that the paragraphs will all be, to some extent, developed. Yet if you know what you’re doing, you can write effective paragraphs of any length — though I will admit that longer paragraphs are more traditional (and more appropriate) in academic writing.

Closing remarks
While this article doesn’t come close to saying everything there is to say about paragraphing, it should serve to give you a few ideas on writing cohesive and well-developed paragraphs.