R. ERIC LANDRUM, PHDDEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-GREEN BAYGREEN BAY, WIAPRIL 17, 2008

Undergraduate Writing in Psychology: Learning to Tell

the Scientific Story

Elements of Storytelling

The character – what is the story about?The backstory – how does the past lead to

present?The plot – what is happening now?The setting – where is the story happening?The details – what should the audience

notice?

Meeting Audience Needs

One writing maxim: Write for your audience Variation #1: Give your instructor exactly what he/she

wants Variation #2: Write for your reader

Why APA Format?

In the 1890s, Joseph Jastrow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggested that “minor studies” be published in a journal to include stating a problem, describing the methods used, followed by the findings, data analysis, and a conclusion

In 1929 a 6½ page article was published to provide guidance in the preparation of manuscripts

The fifth edition of the PM is 438 pages.A sixth edition is underway.

Why APA Format?

“Writing a journal article is like writing a screenplay for a romantic comedy: You need to learn a formula. As odd as it sounds, you should be grateful for APA style. Once you learn what goes where – you’ll find it easy to write journal articles” (Silvia, 2007).

Analysis and Synthesis

These are some of the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

Analysis: breaking down, dissecting pieces and parts

Synthesis: putting back together, finding common themes, threads

Good scientific writing does both analysis and synthesis

Plagiarism

“Plagiarism occurs when people take credit for thoughts, words, images, musical passages, or ideas originally created by someone else” (Landau, 2003).

Essentially, plagiarism is the failure to give credit where credit is due.

In other words, plagiarism is a form of fraud.

Plagiarism

Intentional plagiarism: a purposeful act in which deception on the part of the writer is premeditated.

Unintentional plagiarism: there is no intent to plagiarize, but it happens anyway (e.g., lack of knowledge about citation rules, carelessness, inappropriate use of a source).

Intent may influence the severity of punishment.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Protect your data and your computer passwords to protect against theft.

Do not lend, give, or upload any paper to anyone, even if a student just wants to see what an APA-formatted paper looks like.

Report any theft immediately, including to your instructors.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Save and print all drafts and notes about the paper.

Photocopy or print all of your sources, and do not cite something that you have not personally read.

Be proactive in seeking the advice of your instructor. If someone has been reading your work all semester, they will have an idea if your work is truly yours.

General Details

Follow APA format guidelines precisely.One inch margins on all four sides of the

paper.No right justification (ragged right margins).References cited correctly in manuscript.

Mostly paraphrase. Minimal use of direct quotations.

General Details

When quoting, use proper format; avoid plagiarism.

Have paper proofread by someone else; offer to proofread someone else’s paper, too.

Avoid all spelling mistakes; include page number or paragraph number; no contractions, no abbreviations (unless APA approved).

Write in complete sentences. Avoid awkward constructions. Avoid being too colloquial (too informal). Your paper is not a conversation between us.

General Details

Print using crisp black ink on bright white paper. No printer problems. Staple once in upper left corner. Don’t cut corners here--don’t be cheap. You must hand in 2 copies of the final paper—one will be returned to you, graded.

Choose a plain, readable serif font (like Times New Roman or Courier); no changes in font or font size; use 12 point font throughout.

Ask if you have questions. This is not the complete list of items necessary for an APA manuscript. This is a complicated process. If you could do it perfectly on your first try, you wouldn’t need to be in this course.

Variations on Storytelling

Conference paper sessionsConference poster sessionsWriting for the webWriting for pleasure and insight

Introduction

Introduce the reader to the issue in the first paragraph. Convince the reader that this is an important issue. Perhaps it impacts a large number of people, or it is an essential component of daily life. Try to impress upon the reader the importance of the issue.

Review the available literature on the topic. If there are studies related specifically to your topic, review them here. If there are no specific studies, then broaden your review of the literature to include related areas. Show that you have done your scholarly homework. You are providing a context for your study. There should be multiple studies cited in this section of your introduction.

Introduction

Within this context, identify a problem or area where the knowledge is incomplete. This turns into your statement of the problem to be addressed by this research. You have reviewed the literature, but there is a gap or hole in the literature—an unresolved problem or issue. The goal of your study is to fill that gap or hole by conducting your study.

Provide a clear statement of purpose for the current study. Be specific in the problem you are going to solve. Tell why this study is necessary to solve this gap in the research.

Introduction

Then, give a brief overview of the methodology that will be used to address the knowledge gap. Just a snapshot of the participants, materials, and basic procedure used in the study.

Conclude your introduction section with specific hypotheses to be tested or expected outcomes. What do you expect to happen? Develop your working hypotheses based on your expectations about what is to happen and your review of the literature. Be as specific as possible. The more specific you are here, the easier your statistical analyses will be.

Introduction

Method

The Method section tells the reader exactly how the study was conducted. Three labeled subsections using APA heading rules

Participants: Tell the reader who participated in your study. Tell the overall number of participants, how the participants were recruited, and other general demographics (Age? Youngest? Oldest? Gender? Year in School?). Summarize how participants were selected, how rewarded.

Method

Materials: Describe all the materials used to conduct the study. If so, give credit, else it is plagiarism. Were the materials pilot tested? Your goal is to provide enough information so that another researcher could replicate your study.

Procedure: Give a complete account of how the study was conducted. Under what conditions were participants tested? Individually or in groups? How much time were they given to complete the research, and how much time did they actually use? Provide enough information about the procedure followed so that another researcher could replicate the study.

Results

The major purpose of the Results section is to report the findings. Report your results in paragraph form using the headings provide if that makes sense. Follow APA format for the reporting of descriptive and inferential statistics; include relevant p values. This part is hard--do not discuss or interpret what your results mean; save that level of analysis for the next section of your manuscript.

Every hypothesis mentioned at the end of your Introduction must be specifically addressed here in your Results section, regardless of whether the hypothesis was supported or not.

Results

Systematically report all of the significant statistical findings from your analyses. Remember, no interpretation here; just the facts. Whenever you report a mean, reports its standard deviation. Use APA format in presenting statistical information, including the italicizing of statistics and p values, correct degrees of freedom, etc.

This section is typically dry and not very exciting. You are presenting just the facts. Do NOT tell the reader what the differences / relationships / associations / predictions mean. That is saved for the next section.

Discussion

In the Discussion section you finally get the chance to interpret all the results presented in the Results section. Here is where you have the opportunity to finish telling the story that your started in the Introduction section. What happened? What worked and what did not work? What will the reader be able to conclude from your study? The Discussion section starts out very specific—what happened in this study—and gets broader until you finish with generalizations and conclusions.

Discussion

Start your Discussion with the most important finding of the study—what is your big bang!? Did you find anything that was unexpected, unusual, fascinating, interesting, unique, or counterintuitive? The first paragraph of your Discussion section should have the “take-home” message for the reader—if the reader is only to remember one piece of information from this study, what is it?

Briefly restate the hypotheses from the end of your Introduction section, and discuss whether or not they were supported based on the outcomes of the study. Be specific.

Discussion

Place your study in the context of the study that has come before yours. This means revisiting some of the literature you cited in the Introduction section. Re-cite some of that literature here. Did you fill that knowledge gap or hole that you identified early on? While you might have answered one question, perhaps your study raised three new questions. If your study contradicts previous research, then you need to speculate about why that happened—perhaps it was a different subject population, or the methodologies were dramatically different, etc.

Discussion

Now generalize a bit about the results of your study. Look to beyond a broader context than just those tested. Here you get to speculate on the greater impact of your research, but be sure to label the speculation as such. What do the results of your study mean? In other words, could the results of your study be useful in setting policies about human behavior? How might they be interpreted in a broader context (beyond introductory psychology students at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay)?

Discussion

Present the limitations of your study, but don’t beat up on yourself too much. What went wrong—what do you wish you had done differently? What should be the next study? Make some suggestions as to the direction of future research in this field. What do you suggest be done next?

Conclude your Discussion section with a brief paragraph that (a) restates your take-home message, (b) the importance of your study in filling an existing knowledge gap in the literature, and (c) emphasizes the general importance of your topic.

TPART

Title Page Page header inside 1” margin, number every page, first 2-3 words of

title Running head only on page 1; actual running head in CAPS Title, Name, and Affiliation block are horizontally and vertically

centered Everything double-spaced Title is no longer than 12-15 words Author underneath title Author affiliation underneath Author In the end, your paper should look EXACTLY like the example paper

starting on p. 306 of the Publication Manual

Abstract Starts on its own page (page 2), “Abstract” centered on line 1 Everything double-spaced No longer than 120 words Not indented

TPART

References Starts on its own new page, after the end of the Discussion

section. Everything double-spaced. Every reference cited in the manuscript should be in the

reference section. Every reference in the reference section should be in the manuscript. All name spellings should match. I will check. Really.

References are prepared in perfect APA format, following capitalization guidelines, italicizing rules, indentation, etc.

References are important. They show off your academic achievement, and your grasp of the literature. They provide guidance to those who want to read what you have read. This is your chance to show you are a scholar.

APA rules are sometimes confusing concerning references. Follow the APA Publication Manual precisely.

TPART

Table Be sure to follow APA guidelines for table

preparation. Double-spaced also. No vertical lines on a table; only horizontal lines. Microsoft Word can do this.

Include information about rating scales in the Notes at the bottom of the table so that the reader can interpret the statistical information presented.

The outcomes from nominal scale variables are presented in the table note, because the means and standard deviations of nominal scale variables rarely make sense.