Get Rid Of The Mini-Me Algorithm

The Problem

It seems like every time I grade a stack of papers, I learn something new about why people write badly.  I'm always glad to learn something new, of course, but I know it does my current students little good if I only figure out where they will go wrong after they go wrong.

Today's insight may be specific to a certain kind of writing assignment, though I'm not sure - it may prove to be more general.  I asked my students to summarize a chapter from a book.  The summaries were to be 5-6 double-spaced pages, meaning that the chapters they were summarizing had about 10 times as many words.

The problem was that most of the summaries used exactly the same outline as the target chapter.  My students seemed to be adopting a "Mini-Me" algorithm for writing their summaries (Mini-Me being the character in the Austin Powers movie franchise who was a smaller version of the main character).  Rather than summarize the chapter, my students dutifully went page by page in the chapter, summarizing each topic the author discussed in the target article, and in the exact same order.

I can certainly understand this impulse.  This "algorithm" (an algorithm is a programmatic series of steps guaranteed to complete a task) ensures that every component of the chapter will be mentioned in the summary, and therefore the student won't get marked off for leaving out something critical.  Unfortunately, there are several major drawbacks to this approach:

1.  The resulting summary is very dry - the student feels like he or she must include all the terms and jargon, and has space for little else.

2.  The resulting summary is stilted.  Ideas don't flow, because, to fit 20 printed pages into 5 double-spaced pages, all transitions, explications, and synthetic observations must be removed.

3.  The resulting summary is unoriginal.  The student uses no original thought in the design of the paper - the organization is completely set by the target chapter - and the student has no space for any other original contributions.  Worse, the professor grading the paper is invited to think that the student doesn't necessarily even understand the target chapter, since the paper is merely a dehydrated version of the target chapter.

4.  The resulting summary is more difficult to understand than the target chapter.  One goal of a summary should be to simplify a complex topic and distill it down to the most important concepts presented in a lively, coherent, and clear manner.  By adopting the Mini-Me algorithm, the summary includes not just the most important concepts but also a number of less important concepts and without space to clarify which is which.

Proof That This Is Bad Writing

Here's the proof that this is bad writing.  Imagine the author of the target chapter had been told: sorry, you can't use 10,000 words for this topic.  You can only use 1250 words.

Do you think that the author would write the chapter in exactly the same way?  Would he or she include all of the same topics, in exactly that order, and just reduce the number of words written about each topic?

That's hard to believe.  The author would probably first ask himself or herself, what do I absolutely need to get across?  What elements of this chapter are useful not only for specialists, but for anyone who might read this chapter?  What examples do I use that are the most memorable?  What concepts are the most general?

Following that brainstorming session, the author would then tear up the long version of the chapter and start on a fresh page.  It would be a completely re-envisioned document - a completely new chapter.  Nowhere in the author's writing method would Mini-Me appear.

The Solution

Fortunately, there's an easy solution (and in a coincidence that is no coincidence, it is a solution I offered in my previous blog post, Don't Quote!).  Here is the best algorithm for writing a chapter summary:

Read - Reflect* - Write* - Rewrite

The stages with the asterisks mean that you can't read during these stages.  You shouldn't even consult any notes, except perhaps the barest outline.  That is, when you are reflecting, don't read.  And when you are writing, don't read.

Read the chapter.  Take notes.  Read your notes.  Reread the chapter.  Get yourself to a point where you understand the chapter.  You certainly won't have every single detail in your head, but what you should have is the gist of the chapter.  You should have the most important concepts.  You will remember a couple of really memorable examples.  (Go back and read the third paragraph under Proof That This Is Bad Writing, and see if the list of things you know aren't exactly the things you would need to know to write a good 1250 word chapter summary.)  This is the reflection stage - figure out what are the highlights, then start thinking about how you would communicate those highlights to a reader.

When you begin to write, do not refer back to the target article.  This will ensure that you don't write in the same sequence as the target article, and it will reduce the likelihood that you will include unnecessary details.  You won't be able to take any direct quotes (almost always a good thing to avoid).  Your writing more lively and interesting, because you will probably best-remember the most interesting aspects of the target chapter.  You will only be able to write about what you truly understand, which was probably the professor's goal in assigning the summary in the first place.  You will be forced to include original content in the form of how you organize the summary, make transitions between points, and justify the importance of the concepts you are including.

At the rewriting stage, you are allowed to review your notes and the target chapter.  There is much less danger now that you will shove in unnecessary details or undo the good work of organizing that you have already done.  These additional details and clarifications will now be forced to fit your paper, which is a lot better than the Mini-Me model, in which your paper is forced to fit the details of the target chapter.

And finally, a word about rewriting.  I think another of the Mini-Me algorithm's failures is that it is so sequential.  If you write as you flip the pages of the target chapter, it feels like, when you get to the end, you are done.  What's to go back and rewrite?  You've already assured yourself that you've "gotten everything."  The Mini-Me algorithm is so bad that you can actually convince yourself that rewriting is unnecessary.  By rewriting I do not mean tearing up and starting again.  I mean reflecting on each paragraph in your first draft and asking yourself if it is clear, complete, and flows well with the previous and succeeding paragraphs.  This stage is critical to good writing; any algorithm that omits this stage should be suspect.

Stop Quoting! (You Can Quote Me On That)

The Problem

Many of my students seem to have learned along the way that quoting articles is a good idea.  I'm not sure exactly where this comes from, although three possibilities occur to me.

Quoting To Avoid Plagiarism

Maybe a student picked up the quoting habit in this way.  First, the student turns in a paper in which, through inexperience, he or she plagiarizes some published writing.  The helpful teacher informs the student "If you are going to use someone else's words, you must put those words in quotation marks and cite the source."  From then on, the student now has a license to use other people's words without being accused of plagiarism!  The teacher, grateful that the student has learned the importance of quotation marks and citations, declines to ruin this success by pointing out that, while the quotation and citation has been done correctly, the result is a lousily written paper.

Quoting Out Of Inferiority Complex

When a student is asked to summarize some published piece of writing, it is a rather daunting task.  How can I, a college undergraduate, be expected to write something more clearly and thoroughly than the published author of the target article, when that person has a PhD, 20 years of writing experience, and knows the material ten times better than I do?  Faced with that realization, the student decides he or she can't win.  But if you can't do better than the author, you can at least do as well as the author - by saying exactly what the author said.  The student paper then becomes summary by collage - summary by cut and paste.  Unfortunately, this isn't a summary at all.

Failure To Discriminate Two Types Of Quotes

On the other hand, it may be that the student got good advice from a teacher along the way, perhaps in an English class, that quoting provides a useful starting point to analysis.  That's correct.  The truth is: there are times when quotations are a great idea.  But just because quotations are a great idea sometimes doesn't alter the fact that quotations are a terrible idea at other times.

A quote is a good idea if you want to comment on something the author said - often to critique it.  A quote is a bad idea if you are quoting the author to replace some of your own words.  To put this another way, if you quote the author and then continue on from the quote without any further comment, you've quoted inappropriately.

This point is subtle enough that I will have to make up an example.  Here's a case where a quote is appropriate:

In their article, the authors defined aversion as "a decrease in the amount of the stimulus consumed" (Authorson et al., p. 7).  However, many authors reserve the term aversion for a negative hedonic evaluation, and use the term avoidance to indicate a reduction in intake.

In the example above, the student is commenting on the author's choice of words, and so it is necessary to first document the author's word choice with a quote.  The quote is necessary here, otherwise the student's comment makes no sense.  However, if the student wasn't going to comment on the word choice, and just wanted to report the dependent variable, the quote would be inappropriate.

The Tip:  Don't Have The Source Material Sitting Next To You When You Write

So how do you avoid filling your paper with quotes?  My advice is to avoid the temptation completely by writing your paper without having the work you are summarizing sitting next to you.  This might sound scary, and that's right.  It is fear that makes you quote in the first place - feeling like you don't know the article well enough, feeling like you can't phrase things as well as the authors, feeling like you need to borrow some of the article's "sparkle" for your own paper.  If you have the source sitting next to you, you will give into that fear and your paper will turn out lousy as a result.

So read your target article carefully, take notes, highlight it, whatever you normally do.  Maybe even make an outline of what you want to write.  Then, bury everything.  The article.  Your notes.  Your outline.  Go and write your summary without consulting anything but your own brain.  If you can't do this, you aren't ready to write the paper anyway because you don't know the material as well as you think you do.

Once you've written that draft, of course go back to your notes, your outline, and the source material.  You probably did forget something, you probably didn't say everything perfectly, and who knows, you might even need to get some numbers or even words out of that source material.  But with a draft in hand all written in your own words, it is much easier to resist the temptation of over-quotation.  An added bonus is that if you ever have to recall the information later (like on a closed-notes exam) you will have learned it much better than if you cut and pasted.