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    Epting Precision

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    Sawit Trisirisatayawong
    Article on Argumentative writing

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    Epting Precision

    Uploaded by

    Sawit Trisirisatayawong
    206 views4 pages
    Article on Argumentative writing

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    Article on Argumentative writing

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf
    206 views4 pages

    Epting Precision

    Uploaded by

    Sawit Trisirisatayawong
    Article on Argumentative writing

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf
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    Views: Precision Fist - Inside Higher Ed 5y23/119553 am Advertisement THE SCHOOL WITH THE BEST TECHNOLOGY RULES {LEARN ORE AE0UT EDUCATION SOLUTIONS» Views Precision First ‘August 11, 2011 By L. Kimberly Epting In a New York Times opinion piece this spring, Andy Selsberg, an English professor, advocated a considered change in college writing curicula to focus on short writing pieces and concision first. He even suggested courses focusing on short pieces should precede courses focusing on the tratitiona fve-paragraph essay and longer research papers. | do not know whether such a curricular structure would be the best way to go, but | agree concision is a laudable and important goal However, I do think that in its own concise form, Selsbera's argument is missing a critical piece. | further assert that itis the piece that is missing most in students’ writing: precision, Before | go too far, | should probably clarify a few things. First, | am not a writing instructor directly. | am an experimental psychologist ‘who, in addition to the content of my field, also strives to teach my students to be decent science writers. | also happen to study the conditions of setf-editing during composition (Le., revision), which turns out to be difficult to study in college students because, well they tend not to do much of it — especially substantive high-level revision. It probably also is worth noting that a fair amount of my training as psychologist was in the behavioral tradition (behavior analysis). | appreciate that training for a number of reasons, but perhaps most importantly for its emphasis on precision and for strengthening my attention to the same. Among the challenges faced by a science of human behavior is that the subject matter already has terminology with everyday meaning and connotations. As a result, we must be extra careful to define our terms and use them in the appropriate context, As Philip Hineline puts it, in our science, “our language is also our calculus." This particular training may have done more to develop my critical thinking skils than anything else in my educational history. In this day and age of information by photo caption and tweet, perhaps pressing students to write concisely is the right thing to do. But concise is not always precise, and without precision, concision is just vague at best, and misleading at worst. Several years ago, a student wanted to contest the scoring of one of his test answers in my introductory psychology course. The test question was ‘something to the effect of "What is the primary advantage of an experimental study over a correlational study?" and an example sufficient answer would have been, ‘Causal conclusions may be drawn from an experiment, but not from a correlational study.” ‘The student's answer was, “in an experiment, you actually test something’ (the word ‘test’ was underlined twice). When he questioned why his answer earned no points, | explained that i failed to distinguish the two study types at all, as both correlational and ‘experimental studies "test something’ (\e., in introductory terms, a relationship between variables and cause-and-effect, respectively) He looked at me earnestly and rebutted, “But you said some of the questions could be answered in one sentence, and I underlined test twice.” fener insdehighered com layout stp eee iviews/2011/ Views: Precision Fist nse Higher Ea 8/23/1198 AW ‘After a moment of silence (to contain my disbelief at his statement), | asked him what it would have meant if he had only underlined “test” once, or not at all, and how was | to know those distinctions in meaning, He had no answer. After about ten more minutes of discussion, he finally started to understand that being precise was the key, even if he intialy needed more words to accomplish that precision Truly, being concise should include being precise. | have litle doubt Selsberg intended concision to subsume precision -- | suspect most instructors do -- and formal definitions certainly imply precision is included, For example, the quick Dashboard Dictionary on my ‘computer defines “concise” as an adjective meaning “giving a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive.” Yet my sense is that common usage and immediate interpretation of "concise" increasingly points to brevity first and precision only as an afterthought, if explicitly at all. In a group of 12 students recently, | informally asked what “concise” means. Allof their definitions hinged on notions of brevity; only one of the 12 mentioned precision (she used “accurate"), and it was a secondary part of her definition, The relevance of precision seems to be getting lost among bigger concems to be brief | suspect that for most of us -- and especially for students -- the problem of being concise and precise is partially tied to not yet really knowing what we mean to say. That old adage "say what you mean and mean what you say" resides at the top of the instructions for each of my exams, coupled with, "Please answer the question, the whole question, and nothing but the question.” I include the latter because it represents one of the biggest impediments | see to students’ ability to be concise and precise: a lack of close-reading (or listening) ability. Ina recent pre-test study session with a few students in my office, one student asked if any of the other students could give her a

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