Zooming in on that hemisphere, one can see a big cleft dividing the temporal lobe from the rest of the brain, and the territory on the banks of that cleft repeatedly turns up as crucial for language in studies of stroke patients and brain scans of intact subjects. From the highest vantage point you can make out only the brain’s two big hemispheres, so I began with studies of split-brain patients and other discoveries that locate language in the left hemisphere. It dawned on me that a clearer trajectory through this morass would consist of zooming in from a bird’s-eye view to increasingly microscopic components. First, he talks about a time when he had to write about the vast and unruly literature on the neuroscience and genetics of language. Pinker gives some examples of sensible structures from his own writing. The important point is that each of them is sensible: if someone read an essay with one of those structures, at no point would they feel lost or disoriented by the discussion. Some of these might be more appropriate in different contexts. Or I could take the plays in the order in which Shakespeare wrote them and see how his thinking about love evolved over time. Alternatively, I could group the plays into their sub-genres (comedies, tragedies and histories) and explain the similarities and differences across the genres.Īnother possibility would be to group the types of love into different categories (romantic love, friendship, tragic love, unrequited love etc.) and discuss how they arise in different plays. I could just open a complete collection of Shakespeare’s work and take it play-by-play, discussing all the different forms of love that appear in each play. How should I go about it? There are a number of sensible structures I could adopt. Suppose I want to write an essay about the nature of love in Shakespeare’s plays. But it can be rendered less banal with some concrete examples. The answer is that you should adopt a sensible overarching structure (often referred to as an “essay plan”). What are you trying to say? What order should you say it in? Before you start writing, it’s worth thinking about it at the most general level: that of the paper itself. “Coherence” is something that can be assessed across these different levels. Then come the paragraphs which make up sections and subsections. At the next lowest level, there are the sentences that make up the paragraphs. At the lowest level, there are the words that make up the sentences. There are different “levels” to an academic paper. In doing so, I’ll focus on their application to the kinds of academic writing that I engage in.ġ. In this post, I want to share the four main “tips” that emerge from that chapter. In one of my favourite chapters, he sets out exactly what it takes to write coherently. Indeed, this was one of the joys of reading Steven Pinker’s recent book The Sense of Style. Fortunately, there are other people who can break things down into rules. Getting all the elements of an essay to fit together seems to come pretty naturally to me (though I’m not claiming to be a good or coherent writer). I’m not that self-conscious about what I’m doing when I’m writing, so I’m typically unable to break the process down into a series of rules. The missing ingredient was coherence: the connective tissue that helps to knit together all carefully-worded prose.Īlthough I’ve long been aware that this was the missing ingredient, I have never had much in the way of concrete advice to offer. I cannot remember the number of times that I’ve waded through page-after-page of carefully-worded prose, only to be left in the dark as to what the student was trying to say. Such essays can often be made-up of well-formed sentences, but nevertheless be difficult to decipher. Incoherence is one of biggest flaws I see in student essays. One of these is the importance of coherence in essay-writing. I’ve realised that although most of what I was taught was indeed banal and fussy, there are nevertheless some interesting things to be said about the craft of writing. Teaching such a course has changed my attitude. As a student, this was the kind of course I tended to dislike - usually because the advice offered was either completely banal (“write in a clear, straightforward manner”) or fussily prescriptive (“judgment should be spelled without an ‘e’ when it refers to legal judgment, but with an ‘e’ when it does not”*). The goal of the course is to teach students how to better research, plan and write an academic essay. I’m currently teaching a course on research and writing.
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