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. 

   

The Clock

This semester, students in Dr. Stoub's Advanced Biochemistry class are responsible for leading most of the class sessions. Recently a student made the offhand comment "I don't know how I'm going to fill 75 minutes." It's an understandable concern, but I have noticed it is a concern for students no matter what the presentation length is. Seventy-five minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes - any time in front of a class seems like an incredible expanse to fill - especially since good presentations will boil down to only 4 or 5 main ideas anyway.

The irony is, far more student presentations run long than fail to fill up the time. (You've probably noticed with some annoyance that this is true of professors' lectures as well.) There are several reasons for this. First, students rarely rehearse presentations "live". That is, a student may write out notes or work on Powerpoint slides, but they don't stand up and talk through the presentation straight through, without pauses, with an eye on the clock. Second, students underestimate the time it takes to convey an idea verbally. We think far faster than we talk. It doesn't seem possible that 50 minutes can be filled by 20 slides or by 15 note cards - but it is easily done. Third, students d0n't allow for the inevitable interaction. Good presentations lead to thoughtful questions, points of debate, connections with personal stories or prior material, all of which adds time to the presentation. Fourth, ironically out of nervousness about "filling time", presenters will often allow themselves to meander and to repeat themselves.

Student presenters are not alone in this, of course. I can vividly recall hearing a talk from a scentist at a conference in which the oral presentations were assigned to 15 minute slots. This particular speaker - a big name in my field - happened to have the final slot on the last Sunday of the meeting. He took 35 minutes. The feeling in the room was palpably uncomfortable. People were shuffling their feet, checking their watches, thinking about the line at the hotel to check out and their airline schedules.

I recently had a conversation with Dr. Queen about her Fall, 2008 Neuropsychology class. She told me that one of the best decisions that she made was to insist on a time limit for student presentations - that she would hold to a 1 minute warning signal and then, at the end of the assigned time, the student presentation would be ended. Apparently the threat of not being able to finish the presentation was more powerful that the students' usual fear of filling the time, and as a result, students rehearsed, the presentations were efficient, and the class period useful.

Most professors don't have the heart to end a presentation based on the clock. Or maybe I should say the common sense, given that Dr. Queen's decision clearly benefited everyone. But the point is, you, the presenter, shouldn't need someone watching the clock for you. Timing your talk forces you to stay on point, organize your material, reduce repetition, and accommodate questions and discussion. Rehearsing your talk in "real time" (keeping in mind that during the real presentation you may be interrupted) increases your confidence that you have enough material to fill the time, and encourages you to take more control of what you have to say. Thinking about these issues minimizes the risk that you will "overstay your welcome", repeat yourself, or ramble, all of which are far more detrimental than finishing with a couple of minutes left on the clock.

Empty Phrases

Good writing is more than just figuring out which words to put on the page. Good writing has just as much to do with figuring out which words you don't need. As I've written before, a writer's job is not just to get what's in his or her head onto the page, it is to make sure what is in his or her head gets into the reader's brain. Something is "well written" when a reader expends as little mental energy as possible in understanding the writer's intent.

One simple thing you can do to improve your writing, then, is to avoid using too many words. The more words you use to express a point, the more work your reader has to do to understand your point.

Here's a very common example of what I mean. Read the following two sentences:

The results demonstrated that Long-Evans rats took more trials to learn the maze than Sprague-Dawley rats.

Long-Evans rats took more trials to learn the maze than Sprague-Dawley rats.

Both sentences are perfectly acceptable, but notice that the words "The results demonstrated that" are superfluous. Variations of this show up time and again in papers written for psychology class. The following phrases are hardly ever useful:

• The authors demonstrated that
• The graph reveals that
• The data show that
• The experimenters concluded that

I call these "empty phrases". They are words that you've forced a reader to read that don't help a single bit. Phrases like this clutter your writing. These examples aren't particularly difficult to understand, but when a paper is littered with empty phrases in complex sentences, the reader is left with the impression that the writing is padded and unnecessarily difficult.

After finishing a draft of a document, read it with a critical eye, and hunt down and eliminate these empty phrases. Economize where possible. Scientific writing often requires that you use long sentences in order to specify details clearly, so it becomes especially important that you avoid long sentences when you can.

Wrong Way, Write Way

A 10-page, double-spaced paper contains about 125 sentences. The English language is wonderfully flexible - each of those sentences can be written many different ways and still convey the same point. But just because a sentence is valid does not mean it is well written. As a writer, your job is not simply to put your thoughts into words - your job is much more difficult. Your job is to write words that, when your reader reads them, will convey your intention as easily and efficiently as possible.

Consider the following sentence:

The horse raced past the barn fell.

Is this a valid sentence? You may be surprised to learn that it is, in fact, a valid sentence. It is also extremely poorly written.

The reason the above sentence is so difficult to parse is because horses race and barns fall. Readers are naturally biased to assume that the verb will follow the subject of the sentence - that nouns will be paired with the closest verb.

The sentence only becomes understandable when you realize that "raced past the barn" is an adjectival phrase modifying the noun "horse". In other words, the above sentence is the same as the following sentence:

The horse, which was raced past the barn, fell.

Only now is the meaning of the sentence clear, although it was valid in both cases. Does that mean the writer was "correct" in both cases? Only if the writer views his or her job as the crafting of valid sentences to express his or her ideas. If the writer views his or her job as making it easy for the reader to grasp the intended meaning of the writer, then only the second sentence is correct. Still better, though, would be finding a way to bring the subject and verb together:

While being raced past the barn, the horse fell.

This sentence is still better, since it now conforms to the readers' expectation of the subject and verb being close together. (The new version has the additional benefit of being "poetic" - when horses fall, they do so suddenly and violently, and this is conveyed not only by the word "fall" but also the brevity and suddenness "the horse fell" relative to the longer introductory clause.) This new version is also better because it resolves an ambiguity in the first two versions: the horse - the one that had been raced past the barn - fell, but did it do so while it was going past the barn or did it do so later? It might even have been the next day (the horse, which had been raced past the barn yesterday, fell today while on a routine trot).

I've spent a lot of time on one particular badly written sentence, but the general point is this: you can always express an idea in multiple ways. It is very likely that one way will be the easiest for your reader to mentally process. Your job does not end until you figure out which version of the sentence is the best version. That's precisely the reason writing is hard - you must think your way through each of those 125 sentences. It's hard work - but that's the work of writing.

The Hourglass Method

When approaching writing a paper or giving a presentation, the analogy of an hourglass can be helpful. I'm not talking about the time ticking away until your presentation or paper is due - though of course, that's important! I'm talking about the shape of the hourglass.

The Funnel Method Of Journalism

I sometimes call this "The Funnel Method", and I first heard about it in connection with journalism. One of the truisms of journalism is that most readers read every headline, some readers will read the first couple of paragraphs, and only a scant few will read the entire article. As a result, journalists often try to impart the "take home message" right there in the first couple of paragraphs and provide more specific detail later in the article. A "funnel" is created in which the broadest issues are related first, followed by ever-more specific details.

The Hourglass Method In Journal Articles

An hourglass is basically a funnel on top and an inverted funnel on the bottom. When you are writing a paper or planning a presentation, this analogy reminds you to start broadly and work your way to the specifics at the beginning. At the end, work your way from specifics back to the take home message or broader themes.

Research articles in psychology typically have the following sections, in this order: Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion. These sections lend themselves rather well to the Hourglass Method, since the Method and Results are, quite obviously, the most detailed and specific parts of the research article. A good Introduction funnels its way into these details: it begins with the broad research question, moves on to discuss the relevant literature, and finally specifies the goals of the particular study being described. On the way "out" of the paper, a good Discussion begins with a summary and careful consideration of the results, then links these results to those reported in the literature, and concludes with real-world applications or discussion of where the research area is headed next.

The Hourglass Method In Presentations

Often, a presentation requires an introduction, method/results, and discussion, or can be organized with a similar flow. With a presentation, it is absolutely critical to grab your audience right away. Students often interpret from this advice that they need some "attention getter", joke, or activity at the beginning. What's really needed, though, is just to make contact with some broad issues.

Students also often worry about telling an audience something they already know. It's certainly true that you do not want to patronize your audience. But the hourglass analogy provides a guide here as well. Begin with things your audience does know - get them nodding their heads in agreement, or at least in recognition. Subconsciously, this lets the audience member know "I'm smart enough to follow this presentation, it's worth my time." If you lose them at the beginning, you'll probably not get them back. But if you have them at the beginning, they will be more willing to struggle to keep up when the tough stuff comes.

Don't finish the presentation on details either. Work your way back to the big picture at the end, at the very least by reprising the broad themes you began with. Even if you have "lost" some of the audience in the middle, by leaving them with something they can relate to at the end, they are likely to feel that the presentation has been worthwhile.

Your Audience

In-class presentations are usually graded. It stands to reason, then, that your audience is really one person: the professor doing the grading. It also stands to reason, then, that the presentation is really about you - how well you know the material.

It's a mistake to think so, and in order to give a great in-class presentation, you have to completely change your mind about who the audience is and what the professor cares about.

The professor is actually the least important person in the audience. The reason this is so is that it is very likely the professor won't learn very much from your presentation. In some cases, the professor will know more about the topic than the presenter. In other cases, the professor may not know the topic deeply, but will be the most equipped person in the room to understand what you are saying. The professor will be able to "fill in the gaps" if you are less than clear.

But a good presentation isn't defined by the fact that the most knowledgeable person in the audience gets it - it's exemplified when most or all of the audience gets it. The professor is likely to grade you not based on what the professor gets out of your presentation, but rather what the professor guesses the weakest students in the class get out of your presentation.

Class time is valuable. There are only so many sessions in a semester, and if the professor is giving 2 or 3 or more class sessions over to student presentations, you can bet the professor is hoping that those sessions aren't wasted for the audience. The professor is expecting you to teach them - it's not just 15 minutes for you to show the professor what you know.

So what should you do? When designing your presentation, don't think about what the professor knows, think about what your classmates know. The more effective you are in teaching them, the more successful the presentation will be and the better grade you'll receive.