Week 9 Advanced English

 “Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

Hope Jahren

Chapter Eleven:

According to a study conducted by Richard Light, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government, the amount of writing you do in your academic work is directly correlated with how interested—how engaged—you will be in that work....

...Writing not only engages us more deeply in our studies, it makes our studies more engaging. If new understanding is the destination, writing is the vehicle best equipped to take us there

To test how well a computer program might fill in for a human writer, The Economist enlisted the help of an AI program to write an article for its Science and Technology section. Granted, the technology is still in development, but what they found is not surprising: “Although the sentences [were] grammatically correct, they [lacked] meaning” (“Computer Says”). Crafting a grammatically correct sentence is not difficult; discovering something meaningful to say is. This urge to automate reading and writing lays bare a key philosophical question. What purpose does writing—particularly academic writing—serve? If we write simply to regurgitate knowledge or transcribe grammatically correct sentences from one medium to another, a computer is perfectly capable of doing that work and doing it better than most humans. But academic writing is not a process of duplication. It is, as we’ve suggested in previous chapters, a process of discovery.

 As Bean suggests, they must join a conversation and make a contribution rather than simply providing a play-by-play of what’s happening from the sidelines

Pinker uses overstatement to gloss over subtleties. He writes at one point, “If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting.” Human intelligence takes many forms. Electronic media may enhance some aspects of our intelligence (the ability to spot patterns in arrays of visual data, for example, or to discover pertinent facts quickly or to collaborate at a distance) while at the same time eroding others (the ability to reflect on our experiences, say, or to express ourselves in subtle language or to read complex narratives critically). To claim that “intelligence” can be gauged by a single measure is to obfuscate rather than illuminate.

Develop your lines of argument. This is the main body of your essay and will easily comprise two-thirds of your paper. In this section, establish the reasons in support of your thesis, working to persuade readers that your views are worth considering or even adopting. Support each reason with substantive evidence without committing logical fallacies. Strengthen your position by appealing effectively to logos, ethos, and pathos. Respond to opposing views.

REMEMBER:

Evaluate competing solutions to your problem.

In fact, some learning researchers suggest that struggle in learning is beneficial. When we grasp things easily and quickly, we also forget them easily and quickly. The real problem with highlighting and re-reading arises when they represent your only study strategies. They are easy and comfortable strategies for many students—which also means that they are largely ineffective. They can, however, provide good starting points for your study, if you combine them with 

• Practice testing (flashcards, close your book and test yourself, writing and re-writing key concepts, practice quizzes)
• Spaced study (no cram sessions)
•  Making Connections. When we learn something deeply, we relate it to other aspects of our lives and our existing knowledge. We have thick networks of connections between what we know already—or what we experience outside of school—and what we are learning. As you are studying, try to make connections between what you are learning and other things you have learned or experienced. Ask yourself connection-making questions: Have I ever encountered this before? Have I learned anything similar in another course? In what real-world contexts would this concept or skill operate? Why is it significant? This strategy will work best if you write these ideas down;

GOALS

READ:

Packer, Boyd K. Teach Ye Diligently. Deseret Book Company, 1991

• What have you learned in this unit that will prevent your writing from being “skimmed or binned”?

I think that section headings help to make an essay easier to read and less likely to be "skimmed or binned".

In one of his essays, Nicholas Carr argues, “knowing demands doing.” In what way does the process of academic writing lead to knowing? What steps can you take to make your academic work more engaging—to use writing to “deepen [y]our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it”?