MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

Happy Monday.

DO NOT FORGET MONDAY"S ER Reviewing Task. Doing this on time helps, generally, all your colleagues. You can be especially courtesous to those students in their week of Passover, too.

Let's talk about definitions choices.  One way to manage this helpful background for your reader is to divide the primary or main actor definitions from the secondary or supporting actor definitions. You can arrange these in two waysl. The first way is to use two paragraphs in your cognitive wedge, starting with the primary ones. Then transition to the secondary ones in the next paragraph.  Here is some language in your openings and closing of these linked paragraphs (sharing the job of defining terms for readers):

Before we look at Kaspari's ethnography study, let's review briefly these essential terms:

You can use bullets, if you like; equally fine is a paragraph where you devote a sentence to each definition.

Expert readers in arboriculture may skip or skim these definitions:

Having established key arboriculture terms, let's turn now to method definitions about Kaspari's use of ethnography in this agro-ecology work. 

Ethnography studies typically....

Mixed methods from sociology combines both quantitative and qualitative data sets....

Having described Kaspari's methods that combine rigorous science with thoughtful social science descriptions, we turn to three important take-aways from this innovative 2010 study.

Now you can begin your "thick and rich descriptive" body paragraphs.

A second way to handle these definitions would be to devote one paragraph to the primary or main actor definitions and use nested definitions within the body paragraphs.  To make this work, you should be extremely concise.  And, use appositives as a good technique (introducing short, helpful information, here, definitions).

For example-->

Patel and Shen used pyrosequencing --  detects pyrophosphate release and light generation on nucleotides  -- in their microbiome study of naked mole rats.

For the qualitative data set -- categorical values are qualitative -- Kaspari later used chi-square to assess the presence of a relationship....

Readers will find helpful to recall that chronic wasting disease (a prion "infection") in deer is similar to bovine encephalopathy (aka mad cow disease)....

Both of these definition choices (prefacing paragraphs and nested definitions) are location-dependent. 

• smaller definitions set off by punctuation in an appositive -- think bunny ears, paws, and hind feet.

Now, to analysis paragraphs (the hardest you write, for most). Like definitions, these paragraphs are also location-dependant. You have two choices:

• Using one paragraph, you note one or, say two or three, critique(s) AFTER your three or four body paragraphs. This is the arrangement depicted in the celery flow chart. THINK PEARL NECKLACE; of course, Mb uses a metaphor.
• ANOTHER arrangement is that you locate a critique paragraph in between one or more of your body paragraphs. Make them small paragraphs as a way to signal the critique is not the same as the body paragraphs you are presenting from the research article.  PEARLs with GOLD BEADS. To be specific-->
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  • small analysis paragraphs between your body paragraphs of cool points -- think gold beads between larger pearls.

Voice helps, too, in analysis.  Use first person in your analysis "moves" aka paragraphs and third person when presenting more generally the points of your author.

We will also look at a Google Doc from an earlier semester where we took on questions the week before the one-article review was due.  Can be instructive, I think.

Ok: how do I critique? You have two strategies that will help you work through this critical thinking. First, most researchers conduct self critique!  See what they say and adapt that "science humility" into your critiqu. Then, you can use language to acknowledge this-->

Bove and Dearborn acknowledge that their experiment may be under powered....

Yu and Feliz, anticipating push back about mixed methods, note the chi squared technique that they also retest with a correction for smaller sample sizes: Fisher's exact t-test   . In the supplemental notes, the authors note an additional test, the Monte Carlo mathematetial approach, that is, a chi-squared test with a simulated p value.

Let's also look at language helpers from the Manchester University Academic Phrasebank and a few other places.  Critique and counter argument for junior scientists is hard.  Having some phrases to prime the pump can be helpful. Here, the pump is your brain.  These sentence starters will help you think critically and write with some confidence.

Wikimedia Common, under Creative Commons license

Manchester University academic writing phrase bank. Look at all these sections:

I will post Friday's Writing Task on Tuesday morning.  To prep for Wednesday, look at the stats or number logos that your authors use.  Read about these tests. Wikipedia is a good start. Review your stats notes. You might search on the term in a resource called Stack Exchange. Here is a link to the statisics-search there.