MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

Documents have beginnings, middles, and ends.Here is a good way to arrange your description+analysis:

Beginning: 1-3 paragraphs that prepare the reader to understand and trust the center portion of your analysis (three or four body paragraphs).  Use a cognitive wedge strategy. Think:

Opening (see the seven strategies below -- you can combine them.)

Ethos of lead author

Definitions/descriptions or backgrounds, which is largely common knowledge to your expert audience.

Middle: 3-4 body paragraphs. Start with one paragraph per point BUT you may need to divide complex material into two shorter but connected (by transition) paragraph. These are your larger paragraphs.  You MAY need to nest small definitions -- use the appositive technique -- near the material.

End: Taper off, with some useful information or thoughts for closing.  For example, brief critique  and some commentary on stats used to support the inferences from hypothesis testing (this is hard and will NOT count against your work grade-wise), applications, further line of inquiry, implications for society.

New links for class discussion today:

Academic language phrase bank (really useful for analysis and writing). Spend some time here AND save the link.   Thank you to the fine folks at Manchester University, UK.

Opening moves for technical documents: (seven ways! With examples, a web exhibit on a legacy platform)

Some additional details: Citation/ethos/introduce your lead researcher:  in class, we will talk about the conventions of citation in a close read of an article.  Basically, the steps are:

first mention, full name (in the ethos paragraph that also introduces the article).

(author, date)

last name throughout

Example:  

Marybeth Shea is a professor of technical writing at the University of Maryland. Shea studies stasis theory in environmental policymaking.  Her research article appears in the Journal of Conservation Biology and is the subject of this review (Shea, 2014). Then, in rest of document, refer to the work using the last name:

Shea's approach...

Her findings...

What Shea's inference fails to account for...