PSY 260: The craft of writing and arguing

We have recently reviewed the outline for a manuscript’s introduction and its ‘funnel’ logic, as well as the different sections of an APA manuscript. (It will be a good idea to continue to review Chapters 2 and 3 of the manual.)

In past blog posts, we have been working on editing our content to its barest essentials. Being concise and direct is critical to good scientific writing and communication.

Argument involves using substantive material to make a novel point.

These assignments foreshadow your paper for the course. (Please review your syllabus.) You will need to have a topic approved by me that will serve as an experiment, about which you will then write. As we have begun reading articles in the field and exploring their methodology, we are getting a better feel for what scientific writing must be like and what is stated and not in text. When you write a paper, you must make a novel point by using literature to support your position and the import and inevitability of your particular study. In the end, your results need to strike your reader as obvious. This, however, is because you set them up, not because they were really obvious. A good paper makes the methods necessary and the results inevitable. That is the power of a good argument.