Effective Writing in Psychology. Bernard C. Beins

Effective Writing in Psychology - Bernard C. Beins


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that self‐determined motivation is a useful concept to understand human behavior. Self‐determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985 , 1991) states that, when choice or pleasure is involved, self‐determination can help explain the motivations behind individuals' activities. Alternatively, some individuals participate in different activities because of internal and/or external pressures, so they regulate their behavior in a non‐self‐determined fashion.

       Paraphrase Rewrite

      Senécal et al. (2001) draw from research done by Deci and Ryan (1985 , 1991) for their own work on self‐determination theory, which offers insight into the relationship between human activities and motivation. According to Senecal et al., when choice or pleasure is involved, self‐determination can help explain the motivations behind individuals' activities. Alternatively, “individuals who participate in different activities out of internal and/or external pressures regulate their behavior in a non‐self‐determined fashion” (Senécal et al., 2001 , p. 178).

      This example is relatively straightforward and addresses situations commonly encountered in academic research and writing, and in many cases, it is clear how to avoid plagiarism. Nevertheless, there will probably be moments when you are unsure whether you need to cite something or how to cite it. For example, you might not know if your audience considers something to be common knowledge, or you might wonder if your paraphrase is different enough from the original text. When this happens, just ask someone. Your instructor and university librarians will be familiar with the practices that ensure academic integrity in research and writing, so use them as resources.

      We encourage you to become familiar with what is and isn't plagiarism not only because it is a form of dishonesty but also because including citations and references can strengthen your work. For example, if you are proposing that people who were spanked as children are more likely to spank their own children, drawing from other psychologists' credible, scholarly research that points to the same conclusion will increase the validity of your stance.

      Regardless of the research stage, each time you take notes, you want to be able to connect those notes to a specific source. There are different systems you can use to do this, so find the one that works best for you. For some people, recording a source's complete citation information and then writing notes keeps everything in one place and makes it less likely that either the citation or the notes will be lost or separated. Almost all library catalogs and search engines allow you to email or print citations, and through some article databases you can email or print out entire articles. However, should you email or print citations, you then need to figure out how to connect the citations with your notes about that source. If you will be using a number of sources, programs such as EndNote, Zotero, and RefWorks (which are all reference management software) can help you record your sources and connect them to your notes.

      What we want to emphasize, though, is the importance of keeping track of your sources at the initial research phases and throughout your writing project. There are few things as frustrating as knowing you've summarized, paraphrased, or quoted a source but not knowing which source it is, which causes you to spend time reading through articles or even revisiting the library to get a source you had already returned. Therefore, practices that support academic integrity not only may prevent plagiarism—intentional or unintentional—they may also be more efficient in the long run.

       In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

      Bertrand Arthur William Russell

       The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question.

      Stephen Jay Gould

      Imagine that you have been diagnosed with an illness and need treatment. How do you find out what treatment is the best for your condition? Would you be more likely to trust a doctor or medical student? How would you assess advice from someone who was diagnosed with and recovered from the same illness? Would you choose a drug regimen based on a television advertisement or an internet pop‐up ad?

      Before going into the specificities of popular and scholarly sources, we first distinguish between primary, secondary, and tertiary literature. Each category has distinguishing characteristics that you can use to determine the type of source you've found, but some sources may appear to fit within different categories. Therefore, it is best to conduct a holistic assessment of a book or article. For example, rather than looking only at the author of an article, the journal in which it appears, or the date of publication, consider the range of different criteria we outline in this chapter.

      That is, when a researcher works with human participants through experiments or interviews, when they study nonhuman animals, or when they use archival material (e.g., letters, films, literature, popular cultural artifacts), the publication will constitute primary literature. These kinds of publications will introduce the research, describe the methodologies used, present the research results, analyze and interpret the results, and include references to the sources that shaped the research.

      Secondary sources are those that are based on primary literature. Scholars often write articles that analyze experiments and research that they themselves have not conducted; such publications are often described as review articles. Although it is a secondary publication, these authors still may be making original contributions to their field. By putting a set of sources or studies in conversation with each other or by examining data through a different theoretical framework, they are offering an analysis of other authors' analyses, which can help readers understand primary literature in a new way.

      Tertiary literature will most often not be scholarly, although it may be credible and written by a researcher. These types of sources consist of summaries of primary and secondary literature, so their purpose is to describe information and ideas written by others and not to present a thesis that an author develops and supports with their own research. Encyclopedias, Wikipedia, dictionaries, and textbooks are all examples of tertiary publications.


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