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Never be tempted to make a scissors and paste patchwork of other people’s writing. Always try to put material into your own words and never incorporate sections from elsewhere without attributing them. This practice can easily be detected by putting sections of text into Google, or using plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin, which will give the percentage of plagiarized material, the source and the actual phrases or sentences (see Figure 3.1 for an example), and you will be heavily penalized. Universities and colleges take a very strong line on plagiarism. Use direct quotes only when: • someone very important said something very significant • the point is very surprising, and the exact wording is important • the point is beautifully, succinctly or wittily expressed. An example of the last would be these lines of Alexander Pope’s: True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed. ACHIEVING GOOD OUTPUTS 99 (Pope, 2004, l. 297–298) Put quotes in double quotation marks or, for a longer quote (usually of about 40-plus words), in a separate indented paragraph, and always give the page number of the source as well as the reference. Full guidelines for referencing are given in Appendix 1. Aim to vary the length of your sentences and avoid long, convoluted ones. Short sentences and paragraphs are a good way of providing emphasis. Use abbreviations, especially if you are writing to a tight time limit, but always spell them out, with the abbreviation in brackets afterwards – e.g. intelligence quotient (IQ) – the first time you introduce them. It shows you know what they mean as well as being stylistically correct. (See the section on ‘Exam answers’ below, pages 127–8, for more thoughts on writing clearly in exams.) Good use of punctuation will also help to make your meaning clearer. If you are sceptical about this, consider the now famous example of the panda walking into a bar who, after asking for some food, ‘eats, shoots and leaves’ as opposed to ‘eats shoots and leaves’ (Truss, 2003). We quite often receive essays with virtually no punctuation, making them very difficult to follow. The pressure of university timetables may not always make this realistic, but checking your punctuation is very much easier if you come back to what you have written after a day or so.
100 STUDY SKILLS FOR PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS TOMtip ❖ If you have time, put a printout of your work away for a day or two before reading it through again. This makes it easier to judge how it will appear to someone else reading it through for the first time. It can be surprising how a sentence that you thought was clear and elegant immediately after you wrote it, now looks opaque or clumsy. Presentation The usual expectation is that essays will be word-processed. Most institutions now have libraries or learning resource centres where personal computers and laptops are available (see Chapter 3 on IT). You will have to submit the work in either printed or electronic form, or both. Electronic submission is required if it is going to be automatically scanned for plagiarism. Make full use of all the aids built in to word-processing software (e.g. Word), particularly ‘spell check’. If your IT skills are not very advanced, see if you can find a course to help you at your learning resource centre or through the computer services department. You will find it is time well spent in the longer term. Assess what your essay will look like as a whole and try to make it userfriendly by dividing it into paragraphs, focused round different elements in the account. Tip: Disability ➢ If you have a disability, it is often possible to get specialist advice or even a grant to help you buy appropriate learning tools and equipment. Visit your university’s Student Advice Centre to investigate the possibilities, or refer to the website for Skill: the National Bureau for Students with Disabilities (www.skill.org.uk), and look for details of the specialist equipment allowance that may cover things you need to benefit fully from your programme of study, such as a computer, tape recorder or electronic Braille note taker, together with adaptive technology, training and cost of repairs. Aimhigher (www.aimhigher.ac.uk) will also help you with this. Can you make your work look more attractive in overall outline? This might be achieved by adjusting the margins and length of the paragraphs, arranging the text so that tables or diagrams do not straddle two sheets, and avoiding odd lines of text at the top and bottom of pages.
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Successful Studying Study Skills fo
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Study Skills for Psychology Student
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For Georgina Brennan, Julia Henders
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viii CONTENTS 4.5 Preparing and pre
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164 SUCCESSFUL STUDYING Assessing t
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166 SUCCESSFUL STUDYING Networking
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Appendix 3 Acronyms and abbreviatio
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218 INDEX Blindsight, 189 Body mass
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222 INDEX Phenomenology, 196 Piaget
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224 INDEX t-test, 209 Turnitin, 84-
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