Effective Writing in Psychology. Bernard C. Beins
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because they are lasting expressions of your ideas.
Oral Communication
In contrast, if you are delivering that same research in an oral presentation, you cannot possibly pack the same level of detail and expect your audience to understand your ideas. Working memory is limited to between three and seven chunks of information. So if you are talking to people in an audience, it does not make sense to introduce as many ideas as you would in writing; your audience cannot go back to review what you have already said. They are forced to listen to your ideas in the present and can keep track of perhaps five ideas.
In an oral presentation, you should limit yourself to three or four main points you want your listeners to remember. You can introduce minor points to help reinforce the major ideas, but your audience will have a hard time keeping the details in memory. Professional speakers suggest that you tell your audience what you are going to say, then say it, and finally tell them what you just told them. There is something to this philosophy, although in a research presentation, you should not be quite so simplistic. You should establish the framework of your presentation and repeat critical points when appropriate. Still, in the short period of time allotted to oral presentations, usually 10–15 minutes, you are limited in the amount of information you can convey, just as the audience is limited in its ability to comprehend your ideas.
Poster Presentations
Yet another medium of expression is visual. Increasingly, research conferences are relying on poster presentations for reporting research findings. In this form of communication, you present all your information in a small display that might be about 4 ft × 6 ft (i.e., 1.3 m × 2 m) in size. The dimensions vary from one conference to another, but the amount of space always seems to be smaller than you would want.
One of the worst things you can do is to fill the poster with text. Nobody wants to fight through a poster with endless strings of sentences. The viewer is typically interested in your main points. The use of tables, figures, bulleted points, and other eye‐catching features is a good idea in a poster. During such a presentation, the author of the poster is typically present, so if viewers want to know more details than are available on the poster, they can simply ask.
So, for a poster, you should present the main points with as little text as you can get away with. Visual elements are often a more meaningful way to make your points accessible. The result is often more information than in an oral presentation, but less than in a complete APA‐style research report. It helps that the researcher is present to clear up any misconceptions that arise because not all the information is available on the poster. Furthermore, if you are presenting a poster, you can create a handout that resembles an APA‐style manuscript. In this way, interested people can get the gist of your research and can ask you any questions that come to mind right away. Then they can take your written handout and attend later to the level of detail they desire.
Internet Publishing
A relatively new option for communicating your ideas is through the internet. Web presentations combine various features of traditional manuscripts and of visual displays, but there are some additional elements that foster effective communication. A web‐based presentation allows easy use of visual elements that are often too costly to include in printed manuscripts. In addition, you can use hyperlinks with your text to refer the reader to related web material or to references.
A simple web page is fairly easy to create if all you need is to present text, figures, or pictures, and hyperlinked text. It is helpful to know the code for the language of the web, HTML (HyperText Markup Language), but with the authoring software on the market, knowing HTML is not absolutely necessary. Fortunately, it is fairly easy to learn. You can even save word‐processed documents in HTML format, although generating a well‐formatted web page from a word processor can be tricky.
Effective Communication
A professor named Denis Dutton held a bad writing contest for a few years. The sentence that motivated him to begin the contest appears below; it was about an attempt at educational reform. The prose, which was not intended to be bad, was absolutely incomprehensible. (You should not feel bad if you don't understand it.)
[It] would delegitimate the decisive, if spontaneous, disclosure of the complicity of liberal American institutions of higher learning with the state's brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam and the consequent call for opening the university to meet the demands by hitherto marginalized constituencies of American society for enfranchisement.
(Dutton, 1999)
This book is an attempt to prevent you from writing such incomprehensible prose.
No matter what you choose as your medium of presentation, there are some characteristics of good communication to remember. First, you should establish your theme and organize your thoughts around it. Developing an outline or an idea map (as illustrated in Chapter 2) can be very helpful. To create either requires that you know what you want to say. It is tempting sometimes to start writing without a coherent idea of your message. If you operate this way, your writing may meander toward irrelevant topics.
Second, if you want to communicate effectively, you should make sure that your grammar is flawless and that your selection of words is judicious. When your writing is technically competent, your reader will not be distracted from your message by having to figure out what you mean. You also need to go back to your work to edit and revise it. It helps to re‐read your work when it is not fresh in your own mind; sometimes you can spot problems that were not initially apparent. In addition, your writing may benefit if you ask somebody to read your work and explain to you what is unclear. Mark Twain recognized the importance of revising one's work: “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time, you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say” (Writing, n.d.).
Finally, it is important to remember that even lengthy manuscripts begin with a single sentence. In order to maximize the effectiveness of your writing, you should set up a schedule and a process. B. F. Skinner is a good example; he was an early bird, so he arose and did his writing for a few hours in the morning, a practice that he continued right up until his death.
How to Begin
Find a place where you can concentrate free of distraction, at a time when you are clear‐headed. If you are a night owl, that may be the best time for you to write; if you are an early‐morning lark, that would be a good time. In either case, you should establish a routine. Writing does not happen until you do it. And when you develop your routine, remember to positively reinforce yourself. Identify a goal for your writing session and reward yourself when you reach it. So you might decide to explore and write about a given topic for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, you should reward yourself with a break.
You may need to shape your behavior first, though, so you might need to start with a shorter work period, gradually extending it until you identify the longest period of time during which you can write effectively. Psychologists have identified a phenomenon called post‐reinforcement pause. It refers to a period of time after a reinforcement when the animal (including the human animal) stops working toward another reinforcement (Felton & Lyon, 1966). You should make sure that your post‐reinforcement pauses are not too lengthy.
By developing good writing habits, you will have taken the first step toward successful communicating. The task is often not easy, but the results are eminently satisfying.
In the next chapters, we will explore how you can develop your ideas, connect them to what others have already written, and express them in a style that reflects a sophisticated knowledge of psychology. In the end, you will have an impact on your audience when you write and when