Style Guides

When it comes to writing papers or presentations, one of the most useful tools you can get your hands on is a good style guide.

What's a style guide?

Well, a style guide is designed to make sure that what you write looks "right". Most publications, such as journals and newspapers, have style guides to make sure everyone is following the same patterns.

Style guides do three main things:

• They dictate the formatting of your writing (Do you indent the first line of a paragraph? Use italics for foreign words? Use double or single quotation marks first? Use section headings?)
  
• The give recommendations on grammar and punctuation (How do you use commas in a list? Where should you use semicolons? Can you start a sentence with a conjunction?)
  
• They dictate the way you use references in the text and how you format your reference list (Is the title of the book underlined or in italics? Where do you put the date? How do you write out the volume and issue of the journal article?)

Most referencing systems (APA, MLA, etc) have their own style-guides, and you will find abbreviated versions of these guides on many academic library websites. You will also be able to find the style guides themselves in the reference section of most libraries.

Some libraries may also hold style guides put out by publishers and news sources. Some, like the BBC News Styleguide, are available online.

There are also generic style guides that just offer good advice on how to create a readable, professional looking piece of writing.

You may find your lecturers recommend following a certain style, in which case the style guides become invaluable. Any serious student should probably take a look at one before tackling their assignments, at any rate.

Exam Tips, #3

Know your audience.

It's easy to think of exams as some soulless thing that exists to take away precious hours of your life, but it can pay to remember that all exams are read by someone - after all, someone has to mark the exam, and that someone is likely to be one of your lecturers or tutors.

You've probably seen your lecturers a couple of times this semester. Assuming you've attended a lecture, listened to one of their podcasts or read any of their emails, you've had some chance of observing the people who will be marking your exams.

Even if you've done your best to ignore them and avoid all possible contact, you would have read their notes for each class and noticed what readings they have selected. At least, I would hope you've done this. If not you may as well stop reading now because nothing will help you.

For those of you who have paid attention to their lecturers at some point, I ask a simple question: what do they like?

What sort of theories do they favour? What sort of arguments and writers do they bring to your attention? What really impresses them? Have they ever seemed really excited about a certain topic?

On the other side of the coin, have they ever given you the impression that there is a certain writer or school of thought that they have little time or respect for?

Do they love Piaget and barely mention Vygostky? Are they fond of Jung but think Freud needed to see a shrink? Do they spend two months talking about feminist theory and barely two minutes discussing Marxism?

Now, big question: what are they like? Have you got a stubborn old coot who is thoroughly set in his or her ways and refuses to entertain alternatives? Is your lecturer an excitable academic who loves debating ideas?

Now that you've had a bit of a think about what your lecturers like and the kinds of people they are, here's another question: what do you think would impress them?

Have a few quotes from their favourite writers up your sleeve (you only have to remember one or two to really knock their socks off - most people don't have quotes in an exam answer). Read up a little as part of your study - make sure you know more about their favourite subjects than just what they've told you in class.

Most importantly, remember that your exam is a great chance to show your lecturer that you know your stuff. Remember that you will have an audience, and think about them as you write your answers.

Constructing a Search Strategy #2 - Boolean Operators

Computers are basically giant calculators. Databases and search engines can't think of words the same way we do - as signs representing meanings. They have to think of a word as a thing that can be used in sums.

An illustration I like using is to think about a deck of cards. You can tell the computer to find all of the black cards and it will. You can tell it to find all of the hearts, and it will. You can tell it to find all of the Jacks, and it will - but you can't tell it to find a royal flush, because then it has to think about how the cards relate to each other. Unless you tell the computer exactly what cards are in a royal flush, then it won't be able to find one for you.

This is where Boolean Operators come in. They act as commands telling the computer how the words relate to each other and what should be done about them.

The most common Boolean terms are AND, OR and NOT.

AND tells the database to look specifically for documents that have both of the terms you are searching for. For example, if you ran a search for "rotator cuff", you might get several hundred results. If you ran a search for "injury", you might get several thousand. Most of those articles would be completely useless for an assignment about rotator cuff injuries. However, if you searched for "rotator cuff" AND "injury", the database would only return search results with both terms. It would not find any articles about rotator cuffs that did not include the word "injury", nor would it return any articles about injuries that did not mention "rotator cuff". This could cut the results down from thousands to only a hundred or so. Any other terms you added with an AND would cut the number of results even further.

But what if there was a brilliant journal article that consistently used the word "shoulder" instead of "rotator cuff"? The search above wouldn't find it, because it was missing one of the essential search terms.

This is where OR comes in.

You use OR to tell the database or search engine that these words are interchangeable, and you and happy to accept any article with either (or both). So, ("rotator cuff" OR "shoulder") AND "injury" should pick up any articles that use "shoulder" instead of "rotator cuff", and make sure the word "injury" is included. The brackets in this case are just like the brackets in a mathematical problem - they help the computer to know which 'sums' to do first in the 'equation'.

OR can also help with controlling your search. Say you particularly wanted to know about rotator cuff injuries in sports that involve over-arm bowling. The most obvious ones are cricket and baseball, so you could run a search that looked like this: ("rotator cuff" OR "shoulder") AND ("cricket" OR "baseball") AND "injury".

You will probably find the thousands of results you had to start with have now been whittled down to twenty or so.

Now, if you found you were constantly getting articles about lacrosse, and you wanted to get rid of them from your search results, you would think about using NOT.

NOT basically tells the database or search engine to shut out any articles containing those terms. So, adding NOT "lacrosse" to your search would get rid of any articles containing the word "lacrosse".

Of course, there might be a really good article that uses the word "lacrosse" in one sentence, and the database will reject it just like all of the other lacrosse related articles. You should think carefully about using NOT in your searches. It can be very useful for getting rid of 'noise', but it can have it's downside.

There are other Boolean Operators that you can use in different databases and search engines, but these three are standard for almost all of them. You should check the database guides for the particular database you want to use to see what other operators it offers you.

Constructing a Search Strategy #1 - Key Terms

If you want to find good information for your assignments, you'll need a good plan of attack.

Your "search strategy" is the plan of attack you come up with before you even try to use a catalogue or a database. As you undertake your search, your strategy will evolve and change, but you need to have an idea of what you are going to look for and how you are going to look for it before you even start.

The first step is to sit down with your assignment and take a good look at the question you want to answer. Pull out all of the key terms and write them down on a blank sheet of paper.

The key words are the nouns and verbs, and any adjectives or adverbs that are necessarily linked to those nouns and verbs.

For example, in the sentence "Find three treatments for rotator-cuff injuries and discuss their relative merits, using systematic reviews and clinical trials to illustrate your conclusions" the following key terms can be found:

• Find
  
• Three treatments
  
• Rotator-cuff injuries
  
• Discuss
  
• Relative merits
  
• Systematic reviews
  
• Clinical trials
  
• Illustrate
  
• Conclusions

From there, highlight the words that are telling you to do something (the "action terms") in one colour and ignore them for the time being. If we take the above example:

• Find
  
• Discuss
  
• Illustrate
  
• Conclusions

The exact number of treatments you need to find could be considered part of the instructions, so you could make that first point "Find three".

This leaves you with a number of key terms that can be used to form your search strategy:

• Treatments
  
• Rotator-cuff injuries
  
• Relative merits
  
• Systematic reviews
  
• Clinical trials

Now you need to sit down with a fresh piece of paper and brain storm those key terms. What other words can you think of that are related to those terms? Are there any synonyms that might be used instead? Any antonyms which might be relevant?

Think about how the terms relate to each other. Which terms should you search for together, and which should be broken up for the search? For example, "Rotator-cuff injuries" should probably be split up, as both "rotator-cuff" and "injuries" have a number of synonyms and it would be easier to use them if the two terms weren't always linked.

Are there any terms which might make the search more difficult and should be kept out for the time being (in this example, "Relative merits" describes the kind of information you are looking for, rather than something you need to find information about). It also describes something you should be doing with this information (comparing the merits), so perhaps this term should be moved to your list of "action" words.

Now you should have a list of terms that you can use to look for information. How you use those terms depends on what search tools you are using. Is it a library catalogue? A journals database? An Internet search engine?

We'll look at each of these in future posts.

Before we leave this topic, though, I should point out that the "action terms" (the ones we are ignoring for the search) are still very important, and you should keep that list of them somewhere safe. When you have finished finding the information you need, those "action terms" will tell you what you need to do with it in order to pass the assignment. Definitely worth paying attention to.

Getting the Most out of Orientation

Orientation Week at the beginning of each semester is a time when most departments are trying to give you whatever information you need to hit the ground running.

The orientation week at the beginning of first semester can be daunting. This is the time when the most new students are trying to find their way around the university or college. The crowds can be large and the information a little out of context as you don't know what you need to know just yet. Many students can find orientation week a little disorienting.

It is still well worth your while to attend, though, and if you can push through the stress of all the newness, you will learn some things to your advantage.

The O-week for second semester is usually a bit less stressful. Crowds are smaller and there are fewer events to attend, so its easier to work out what you want to see.

It's always a good idea for a new student to attend the orientation week sessions before starting studies, but it can also be useful for first year students to attend the o-week for the next semester as well. By this stage in time you would have a better idea of what you need to know to make the most of your studies (or at least to make things easier while studying at university/college) - the sessions may seem more relevant as they might be answering some questions instead of giving you information out of context.

To get the most out of any orientation week you should look at attending sessions offered by your School and the Library. A good rule of thumb is to try to attend at least two sessions offered by each. Beyond that, you should also make a point of attending at least one social event - preferably something that gives you the chance to find out what sort of groups and clubs are around the campus.

A little bit of effort put in during orientation week can make the rest of your semester run much more smoothly, so it's worth pulling out your new student diary and marking in a few sessions.

Tips for Studying in Block Mode, #1

Ah, yes, block mode.

An interesting form of study. On the one hand it gets subjects over and done with rather quickly, on the other hand it's a bit like the Tour de France: a hard slog that barely gives you time to notice how much you're hurting.

My first tip for surviving... er... studying in block mode is to think about it as an endurance sport. You won't get anywhere by thinking about how big an undertaking the whole thing is, you have to take it one manageable stage at a time.

So, think about each week as a stage in your tour. Set goals to achieve for that week, and give yourself a reward for every goal that you can tick off your list. Even giving yourself a gold star can make the world seem like a brighter place.

Don't worry so much about the work you have to do next week. Next week is a good enough time to worry about that. Of course, if you have something due on the Monday of next week, you might want to incorporate it into this week's goals...

And, remember, the library is still there, and the librarians have less students to work with at the moment, which gives them more time to help you. They're more than happy to help you tackle the research you need for your assignments.

So, remember, you've got a support crew and you only have to tackle the studies one stage at a time. You're not doing it all on your own, and you're not doing it all in one hit. Breathe, put 'one foot in front of the other' and work steadily. You'll get there in the end.

Exam Tips #2

Cheat sheets are the way to go.

"What do you mean?" I hear you cry. "Surely we are not allowed to cheat?!"

That's very noble of you, but I don't actually expect you to use the sheets to cheat. It's just worth your while to prepare them as if you were going to.

Go through all of your notes from the semester (and those of anyone else in your study group) and put together a sheet of things you would like to take into the exam with you if you were going to cheat.

What things are you so certain will be on the exam that you would take in some ready made notes? What areas are you so weak in that, should you see a question about them on an exam paper, you would go into a cold sweat and wish you had some notes to cheat with?

Do this a couple of days before the exam, then read over them a couple of times everyday up until "D-Day" (and as many times as you think you need to just before the exam). Read them aloud, if you can. Read them to someone else (like your room-mate, mother or dog) - even though it bores them to tears.

You will be pleasantly surprised by the fact that you will be able to bring these sheets into the exam with you. Not physically, of course, but in your head. They will be as fresh in your mind as the TV show you watched last night.

Of course, if you're the kind of person who can't remember what they watched on TV last night, you may need to use them to cheat...

But, of course, you won't do that. Will you?