Effective Academic Writing: Word Choice

One of the most important things to keep in mind when trying to write a compelling academic paper is to use the right words for the right occasion. This post aims to help you understand what the right word for the right occasion is.

You want to make sure that your reader understands what you are trying to say. As such, you are trying to be as clear as possible in as few words as possible. This is the real point of an extensive vocabulary. Advanced vocabulary allows you to be accurate, while remaining maximally communicative and concise. The bonus is that advanced vocabulary also makes you sound smart and confers a certain "academic tone" to your paper.

Occasionally, people try to skip straight to the "sounding smart" and "academic tone" part, without paying enough attention to the accuracy, clarity, and communication parts of this game.

DON'T DO IT!

The best way to ensure that you paper receives optimal consideration is by it having a good internal logic, a nice presentation, and accurate vocabulary. As such, try to avoid using vocabulary you are unfamiliar with in order to make your paper look better. Using big words in the wrong way never makes you look good...

Take home message: Academic tone comes from using a polite register and appropriate vocabulary.

Check out the video below for some more insight!

Cheers!

Nadine

Review of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

I just saw this movie yesterday. Though a triumph of visuals in many ways, my entire cinematic experience left me scratching my head. Let's take it from the top:

We arrive in the cinema wondering why our tickets cost so much. Oh, right, 3D. (Why?)

The previews are enough to make anyone think we are the strangest species in the universe. A series of post-apocalyptic horror movies (except they are not really horror movies, just excuses for big wars and big explosions. I call that horrific, personally). I get that movies are fantasy land. But if I had the choice, I would choose fantasies that were more wonderful, more beautiful, and more inspiring. (So again, why?)

Then the movie starts. I went with a friend who knows nothing about the books. I on the other hand, am what one might call a moderate fan. (How does one know where one stands in the world of Hobbit fandom? Good question. I have read all the books more than once, am familiar with Tolkien canon, and have watched every Tolkien documentary I could find on YouTube. I still haven't read the Silmarillion. You just cannot be hardcore until you've read the Silmarillion...)

The movie starts off where you'd expect, given how Smaug left the scene at the end of the last movie.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Smaug descends on Laketown and wreaks havoc. It's awful. Bard's heroic save of the city is made much of (as it should be), and Smaug is no longer.

We then move to a rather lengthy talk through of Thorin's dragon sickness. It's pretty sad. Throughout this segment we see the White Council in action and see the pieces of the puzzle come together through rogue-elf Tauriel and smitten Legolas' actions and reactions. Pretty nifty. This is what they mean by "mining the appendices".

The battle heats up as the Five Armies start to convene at the Lonely Mountain.

Ok here's where the trouble starts for me. So far there have been stunning visuals and I love how they demonstrated that the White Council was on the case since the beginning. We also get to see the Lady Galadriel in action. Very impressive.

It just seems like in order to get this all to happen, the filmmakers had to make the characters act unnaturally and wrong (to borrow a phrase from Jane Austen). This started in the last movie when the dwarves were about to abandon their quest so Bilbo could save them (what?) and when Fili and Kili stayed behind in Laketown ("You belong with the company" "I belong with my brother!"... What?!). This is of course leaving out the dwarf-elf romance (which in itself didn't bother me) and the part where Tauriel was able to heal a Morgul wound just-like-that (that did bother me).

But this movie went a step further. For example, Tauriel held the elven king at arrow point and Legolas stepped in to stop her being killed for it. What?! They are soldiers!! They would never disrespect their chain of command like that, and though the Elf King was made out to be rather more disagreeable in this movie than in the book, he is still an Elf lord -- not a bad guy. I felt that these characters were acting unnaturally.

The other important departure from the story to me was that, in the book, Thorin's redemption comes from charging out and rallying elves and dwarves and men to him in a final desperate push against the enemy. He stays on the battlefield and at that point really becomes the Dwarf King he has forever wanted to become. It is a deeply touching moment because he really comes through when not only dwarves needed him, but everyone needed him. He takes charge, he takes the lead, and he dies, and his nephews die defending him. It is a truly touching and tragic moment because that is also effectively the end of their line. But he dies a King. In the movie, Gandalf says "They are rallying to their King". But then they have this king  leave the battlefield to have his final showdown with Azog somewhere up in the mountains.... Sigh.

It's dramatically successful and much less touching.

SPOILERS OVER


Though my friend was happy that all the action started when it did, I found myself feeling a little let down that the movie, though respecting the story's chiasmic structure and emotional arc, left out some of the important moral bases of the literary narrative.

The point I think this illustrates is that you want to really consider not only what your message is, that is, what you want to share, but also who you want to share it with. Ninety percent of this game is half mental. And the rest is too.

I want to say I applaud the filmmakers for their work, because I believe The Hobbit to have been a terrifically difficult adaptation to the screen because it is so layered. Also, Tolkien knew there were seams in the plot connecting The Hobbit to LOtR, and once said that in order to make everything work he'd have to go back and write The Hobbit again from scratch. So I am thrilled that such a beautiful set of movies have been made that have tried to do this. Thank you for giving us so many years of Middle Earth, thank you to the actors, the filmmakers and everybody who contributed. These movies have been a joy to watch and I hope that any deviations from the literary narrative simply  inspire the new readers to dwell on those sections more curiously and unravel their meanings and teachings. Meanings and teachings which Professor Tolkien certainly imbued them with.

Effective Academic Writing: Returning to the Conversation

A couple of years ago I embarked on a career change. I felt that my PhD wasn't offering me the opportunities that I wanted to be truly generative. I felt that I learned a lot (A LOT) both in an academic and non-academic (just life) sense, but that it was time to move on.

Since then, I have continued to be engaged in the research world - and hope that flame continues to burn strong. I have also started a tutoring and online learning company called NBE Education.

I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to share what I have learned over these past 10 years on the topics of psychology, stress, health, and learning.

One of the things that I have found myself focusing on a lot when I tutor university-level students is academic writing (the other is statistics). I think that writing is something that many of us struggle with, especially in academe, which is bound by very strict rules regarding 1) what you can say, and 2) how you can say it.

To help people out with their writing, and encourage students to write their brilliance (tell the world!) I have created an online course that goes through some of the nitty-gritty of academic writing. The course isn't really designed for the first-time academic writer; it's for people who have written college-level papers before, but feel like they just aren't where they need to be. Maybe you feel like you somehow still can't seem to get your message across. Maybe you feel like you struggle with some basic issues such as how to write a good introduction, how to close you paper in the conclusion. If any of these apply, this course is for you!

Usually this course costs $35. But, given that I want as many people as possible to benefit from this information, I am giving away 20 coupons FREE.  After those 20 coupons are gone, you can get the course through this link for only $7!

If you don't want to spend the money I have also started a YouTube channel where I share some tips and tricks about academic writing, and will be sharing and posting more videos on more topics in the future.

I am so excited to be embarking on this new phase, and hope that you will stay with me throughout this transition!

Thank you to everybody who has followed me for all theses years, and here's to many more!

Peace & Blessings,

Nadine

Trees In Trust

Trees In Trust

This is a marvelous website that allows you to donate to the associated land trusts to buy old forested land in Canada, so that it stays protected with the strongest laws available.

A truly great initiative, and a great way to help protect the environments and eco-systems that sustain us.  Another plus is that you can dedicate the land and present it to a friend as a gift.

I highly recommend this very valuable initiative.

The value of subjective patient reports

Yesterday I was speaking to one of my professors about the emerging receptivity to subjective patient reports in the scientific literature.

One of the big challenges being faced by cancer survivors are serious cognitive deficits, partly due to the effects of treatments and also to the effects of disease.  However, these deficits are often not addressed in the treatment that cancer survivors receive.  Neurological tests, such as the Boston Naming Test (where you have to say that a car is a "car" and a duck is a "duck"), often come back normal, and so -- with no objective measure of cognitive deficit -- individuals are being told that they do not have any problems.  They must be imaginary.  We used to (and still) do this with some pain sufferers.  If our methods cannot detect an underlying problem that would cause pain, we tell them they must not have any.  Their problems are "just in their heads".  Imaginary.

This is plainly ridiculous.  If a person says they are in pain, they are in pain.  In 1968, a new (well, it was new) definition of pain was introduced into the nursing field: "Pain is whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever he says it does" (McCaffery, 1968).  I believe the same is true of deficits of complex functions like cognition.  If a person says they are not functioning as well as they used to, or as well as they should be, and we can't measure it -- too bad for our measurements!  The person has a real complaint, and it is our job to figure out how to improve the situation.


The greatest failures of science in my opinion occur when people fail to realize that their algorithms or models or measurements or theories are wrong.  When we are faced with information out in nature that does not fit in with our model, and we dismiss that information instead of our models.  We need to be building frameworks that CAN and DO include the information out in the world!  I was thrilled to hear of the 'revenge of the subjective' in health science!


Though we may not be able to measure a given problem at this time, if we have a good question to ask, we might be able to come up with a good answer.  The beauty of real problems is that they come with real solutions.  Just because we don't have the measurement yet doesn't mean we will never have it.

In the meanwhile, it is difficult to sit with the pain, the anxiety, and the anguish of knowing that people are suffering.  It can be equally difficult to know that some people who are complaining of certain kinds of pain, emotional or physical, are malingering and working the system for reasons sometimes good and often not.  But I believe that how we deal with these problems will end up defining who we are as a science, and that humanity and forbearance are our best bets for coming out on the other side unscathed.