ASSIGNMENT and DISSERTATION TIPS
This version is very similar to version 5.2 (2005) with two exceptions. [1] Changes in technology have necessitated the rewriting of sections dealing with the submission of audiovisual materials. [2] New sections on Musical symbols and abbreviations and on Guitar notation have been added. Pages are renumbered and cross-references updated.
This version is produced only for US `Letter' size paper. To obtain a decent print-out on A4 paper, please follow the suggestions at http://tagg.org/infoformats.html#PDFPrinting
Les sections suivantes de ce document existent en français et sont disponibles en ligne |www.tagg.org/udem/MasinoTips1.htm| :
La section 1 existe dans le document ABC de la remise des travaux |www. tagg/udem/ABCremise.htm |. Toutes les autres sections ne sont disponibles que dans ce présent document en anglais. Si vous voulez m'aider à traduire le reste de ces « Tips », n'hésitez pas à me contacter | www.tagg.org/infocontact.html | . Merci.
(Online version 5.3., May 2007)
This text was originally written for students at the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool. It has, however, been used by many outside that institution.
The aim of this document is to address recurrent problems that many students seem to experience when writing essays and dissertations. Some parts of this text may initially seem quite formal, perhaps even trivial or pedantic. If you get that impression, please remember that communicative writing is not the same as writing down communicative speech .
When speaking, you use gesture, posture, facial expression, changes of volume and emphasis, as well as variations in speed of delivery, vocal timbre and inflexion, to communicate meaning. None of these means of expression are at your disposal on the written page. You have to compensate for this lack of paralinguistic expression .1 Such compensation entails taking care to spell correctly, to punctuate your text into a state of comprehensibility, and to provide your text with an understandable structure and sense of direction. You may well know what you mean by what you write: the problem is that unless what appears on paper can be interpreted as the same thing in the reader's mind, there will be a communication breakdown.
The object of this text is therefore to help improve communicative skills in essay and dissertation writing. Of course, it is more important to write with enthusiasm than to be inhibited by rules of punctuation, layout and grammar. However, with all the enthusiasm and best will in the world you will fail to get your message across to readers if your writing is clumsy, ambiguous, incomprehensible or peppered with errors. This booklet is supposed to help, not hinder, your chances of communicating your thoughts in writing. Good ideas mediocrely presented may well be preferable to mediocre thoughts in a pleasant linguistic package, but good ideas well presented are invariably a relief to read, sometimes even a joy. Your readers -- and that does not just mean those who mark what you write at university -- will be happier if they can quickly and easily understand what you write.
Another important reason behind this booklet is the incontrovertible fact that you are more likely to succeed in many jobs if you write well than if you write badly .
Imagine, for example, that your job requires you to carry out one of the following tasks:
If any of these tasks were to be discussed face to face at a meeting and you turned up in flip-flops and nylon shorts, you would not be taken seriously, especially if you went on to swear like a trooper, mumble incoherently or utter erratic statements without respecting the views of your interlocutors. By the same token, you will not be taken seriously by your readers if your written language is bad, unclear, opinionated or too colloquial. Nor will the impression you create be improved by messy layout, clumsy sentences, bad spelling and punctuation any more than your sartorial elegance was enhanced by donning flip-flops and nylon shorts for board meetings. This manual should help you out of any scribal flip-flops or nylon shorts you might own and provide you with linguistic attire more appropriate to the tasks listed in the bullet points above. In fact, two more points need to be added to the list. Imagine, for example that:
These last two points, as well as the six which preceded them, make it clear that you are well advised to read this manual if you are at all unsure about your writing skills.
Although the reasons just presented for improving your writing skills may be convincing -- they certainly can't be accused of being narrowly academic --, it is quite sad that they have to be stated at all, not so much because those reasons ought to be obvious to anyone of average intelligence as because they sound like a threat: `if you don't write properly it'll be your own funeral', so to speak. Whatever validity such a threat may own, I personally find a stick much less motivating than a carrot. True, you have a better chance of a better job if your writing skills are good, but there is much more to writing -- and to life -- than that.
It is, frankly, more fun to be understood and respected than misunderstood and ignored, even ridiculed.2 Just as the ability to make music in more than one style enriches your music-making, just as being able to converse in a foreign language means that you can get to know more people and be exposed to more ideas, the ability to write also expands your communicative horizons. If it's fun to communicate with others through music, then knowing how to wield the pen or computer keyboard ought also to be fun. It's a all question of personal empowerment.
Otherwise, this is a reference manual with a detailed index. To find out, for example, how to deal with e.g. and i.e., or with its and it's, or with capitals, bibliographies, footnotes, abbreviation, planning an assignment, etc., look up the subject, problem, procedure, word, or abbreviation you want to find out about by using the index at the end of the manual. Then turn to the relevant page and read the relevant section.
The following typeface conventions are peculiar to this booklet:
This is the typeface for example text.
This is a quotation passage within an example text.
This is a bibliographical entry example.
Optional text is placed in square brackets, thus: [optional text] .
§ means `section' or `paragraph' number. For example, §6.5.2.1 should be about initial adverbial markers.
The phonetic anomalies of standard UK English (Southern/official/'BBC') are set out as follows according to the International Phonetic Alphabet.
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a bout, bett e r, circ u mspect, c o rrecti o n, curr a nt, curr e nt, h e r, col ou r, f i r, f u r, fu e l, li a r, ly re , t e rrific, tut o r, meas u re |
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In the case of most analysis and composition assignments in popular music studies, the purpose of notation is not to act as a medium for subsequent performance. Large format scores, although easier to produce, are therefore totally unnecessary and ecologically unsound, especially if they are to be duplicated for the whole class.4 Therefore, please observe the following guidelines.
For handwritten notation on manuscript paper, use black pen. Never submit pencilled script and do not use coloured pens. Best notation results are obtained by using notation software (see #See If possible, use notation software to produce your music examples, transcriptions and written compositions. Most notation software packages export to image files which can then be imported into most types of desktop publishing software (recommended software: Finale or Sibelius).., above).
If your assignment requires submission of material stored on CD or DVD, please remember the following.
You are strongly advised to use a computer for your written assignments for the following reasons:
Although section 2 deals with fundamental issues in writing a dissertation, many parts of this section are also relevant to the writing of longer essays. Some parts are even applicable to the writing of normal essays.
Before you start your work in earnest you should have a reasonably clear idea of what you want to say. At this stage, the best questions to ask are:
If you try answering the six questions, listed above, before you start your work in earnest, you will be able to formulate a clear problematisation of the issues you want to raise. This means that you tell the reader why you are writing about your topic by identifying a set of contradictions or an issue of contention that needs to be resolved. Like a murder story, which by definition needs an initial murder to be cleared up, a good essay or a good piece of research needs the clear presentation of a problem to be solved .
Problematisations in popular music studies dissertations tend to be of the following types:
In other words, problematisation involves:
A good way of starting your problematisation section is to use concrete examples of the main contradiction you intend to resolve in your work and then to discuss the epistemological underpinnings of that contradiction.6
Trying to answer the six questions will also help you form a clear hypothesis, i.e. an intelligent hunch about how the problem can be solved . As with the murder investigation, this should lead you to suspect certain progressions of cause and effect as more likely than others and to formulate the best methods for answering the questions raised. Hypotheses may not be totally verifiable or falsifiable but they should always be fully discussed in such terms.
If you present your hypothesis as it were a foregone conclusion it ceases to be a hypothesis. Just as you would not expect anyone to read through a whodunnit story to the end if the whodunnit question is answered at the start, no-one will want to read your work if you start with a foregone conclusion.
As with murder cases, academic problems and their solutions also have precedents in the sense that other people will have almost certainly dealt to some extent with similar questions previously. They may even have dealt with similar questions in a similar way. It is for this reason that you must check who has said or written what on topics similar to yours. You will also need to check if others have approached a topic comparable to yours in a useful fashion. Standard reference works can be a useful starting point here, as can keyword searches in computerised bibliographies (e.g. at the main library) or via the Internet. Even your supervisor or course tutor may be able to help.
This exercise in checking the existing body of knowledge in relation to your topic is motivated by the following considerations:
As you read other people's work or glean information and ideas from interviews, questionnaires, broadcasts, recordings, etc., it is important to note carefully all the necessary reference details (see See References.; See Specimen appendices.). Omitting this chore usually means an inordinate amount of extra work in the final stages of the essay or dissertation because it becomes necessary a second time to find all the books, journals, records, etc. you had access to earlier on anyhow. With interviews, broadcasts, newspapers and rented videos, such omission is particularly difficult to rectify: questions like `when was it I interviewed such and such a person?', `what date was that programme on which channel?', `on what page of which issue of that newspaper did I find that report?' or `what was the year, company and number of that video which is now deleted from rental circulation?' can be hard to answer!
It is important that you clarify the meaning of certain terms from the outset. Some may be highly specialist or consist of abbreviations that just need a little initial explanation. Others, usually more well-known terms, can be problematic. Working definitions, specific usage of terms, etc. are discussed under See Definitions.. Some names (people, places) may also need introduction or explanation before they are used on their own.
Plagiarism, from the Greek plãgiow (=askance, treacherous) via the Latin plagiarius (=kidnapper), means taking the ideas of someone else and passing them off as your own. In Roget's Thesaurus,7 plagiarism is mentioned in the same breath as theft, fraud, bluff, fake, sham, forgery, deceit, dishonesty, imposture, swindling, cheating, pirating, misappropriation and breach of trust.
Avoiding plagiarism does not mean that you should not use other people's ideas; on the contrary, good research draws largely on the work of others. Plagiarism occurs only when the work of others goes unacknowledged and is passed off, intentionally or unintentionally, as if it were yours. Plagiarism is best avoided by clearly referencing the source (author, work, date, page or bar number, etc., see §11) of the work you quote, paraphrase, draw on, are influenced by, etc.
Markers suspect plagiarism on the basis of certain common symptoms, for example: [i] clear changes of style within the same assignment; [ii] notable differences in the frequency of linguistic errors between different sections of the same assignment; [iii] turns of phrase that do not seem typical of the student's usual writing manner; [iv] facts, proper names, vocabulary, types of subject that do not seem to be part of the student's usual discourse or competence; [v] in-text references that are either inadequately sourced, or not sourced at all; [vi] page references omitted in conjunction with in-text references; [vi] the presentation of ideas or of a writing style with which the marker is previously familiar from elsewhere.
Plagiarism is regarded as a serious type of fraud and treated accordingly. An assignment suspected of plagiarism is always given to a second marker. If both markers independently harbour suspicions of plagiarism, or if the plagiarised passage is found by either marker, the matter is passed to the Head of Department who conducts his/her own investigation. On the basis of that investigation a decision is made as to whether the student may resubmit or whether the student should fail, or whether other measures are called for. Plagiarism can in particularly severe cases result in expulsion from the university.
It is both easy and tempting to copy from the internet and paste into your own work. However, no matter what type of data you copy (text, image, notation, recording, etc.), it is just as much the result of someone else's work (author, editor, composer, arranger, artist, etc.) as that stored on more conventional carriers (book, periodical, sheet music, phonogram, videogram, etc.). Internet plagiarism is therefore viewed as seriously as its conventional counterpart.
If you feel tempted to `lift' from the web it may be useful to know that investigating suspected plagiarism is a simple, if boring and time-wasting, procedure. All the marker needs to do is to ask a search engine to produce hyperlinks to all web pages containing certain combinations of words or phrases. Eight times out of ten we find the page after a few minutes, once out of ten after just a few seconds.
Of course, if you fancy yourself as a `clever-clogs', you can use various tricks to make the investigation process more difficult. Apart from ethical issues at stake, it is worth remembering that the amount of work necessary to succed in such dishonesty far exceeds that of simply indicating references clearly and honestly. Web plagiarism is just not worth the effort, however low your ethical standards may be.
Although this section deals primarily with dissertation writing, many parts of this section are also relevant to the writing of essays and assignments.
A well-structured piece of writing is much easier to read than one whose thoughts and descriptions wander all over the place. One simple rule is to decide what in your written work constitutes the beginning (or introduction), the middle (the `meat' of the work) and the end (or conclusion). You will also need to decide what information belongs in the main body of text and what should appear in an appendix.
The introduction should present the following:
It is not essential that points 1-6 be presented in the above order, but it is often logical for the aim to arise out of the problematisation.
The middle should contain the main substance of the work. What constitutes that substance will vary, according to your topic and its aims, from analytical or theoretical discourse to the presentation, description and discussion of empirical materials. It is important here to draw up a clear order of presentation so that both description and discussion follow a coherent and comprehensible pattern.
The final section of your main text should contain your conclusions -- a brief summary of your findings, evaluations and recommendations. The end may also contain a future research need statement, i.e. an account of what still needs to be discussed and researched.
Appendices are usually presented in the following order.
Please note that the number and type of appendices necessary will vary considerably according to the subject matter and academic level of your assignment. For example, it may be better to combine all recorded references (e.g. CDs, videos) into one single appendix; or you may have used footnotes rather than endnotes; or musical notation may not be relevant to your assignment; or your assignment is too short to warrant an index.
Before you start on your final write-up it is advisable to have the following already written down in some form:
The reason for this suggested order of working is that it is much easier to write the final version of both the introduction and the conclusions if the middle section, containing the main substance of your work, is more or less complete beforehand. This way of producing the final write-up may seem easier for students using word processors than for those typing or handwriting their work. However, there is nothing that prohibits typists and handwriters from leaving the last page of their introductions partially blank, provided that all pages are numbered in correct sequence.
This section applies equally to all types of written work.
The whole point of writing an essay or dissertation is to present ideas, accounts and arguments that will interest and convince the reader. If you wish to achieve this aim, your text must be clearly presented and comprehensible. Although it may be hard work reading unnecessarily difficult words or long sentences, comprehensibility is far less likely to be impaired by these factors than by the following:
There are three types of obstacle to comprehension caused by lack of verbal definition in essays and dissertations: unknown concepts, ambiguous concepts and unknown names.
The first two types of concept require some kind of definition. The third type demands that the relevance and identity of the name in question be explained. Absolute definitions (those covering all possible meanings in all popular music study contexts) of the first two types of concept are not necessary. However, it essential to provide at least a working definition, i.e. the sense in which you will be using the term in the work you submit, or a delimitation, i.e. the particular or restricted (limited) meaning you are applying to the term in question.
Obviously, you do not need to spell out the meaning of abbreviations like CD, DJ or BBC. However, the abbreviated names of less well-known entities may well need explanation, as do abbreviations you invent yourself.9 If you plan to use several recurrent abbreviations of this type, it is worth providing the reader with a list of abbreviations amongst your appendices ( see also See Abbreviation markers.; See Abbreviations. ).
You may be highly familiar with certain technical terms of which intelligent popular music readers may well be totally ignorant. For example, are you really sure they already know what an Aphex exciter is and what its effects are? If not, explain, or at least let readers know where they can look up its meaning.10
Since your assignments are neither contributions to fanzine X nor written for the mutual admiration purposes of in-crowd Y, you should angle your work with a much wider readership in mind. Most people, including your readers as well as yourself, will probably be popular music specialists of one kind or another, but the reader's area of expertise is unlikely to coincide with yours. You may well know details of particular artists, venues, scenes, labels, chord sequences, instruments, etc. so well that you expect everyone else to be equally interested and initiated. Such an assumption is both false and short-sighted. To readers who do not subscribe to fanzine X, who have no idea what music is played at venue Y, or of what goes on there, to those who may have heard of band Z, but who only have the vaguest of notions as to how they actually sound (let alone what topics their lyrics deal with or who buys their records), dropping `names in the know' is confusing, pointless and off-putting. Therefore, if you refer to such names, provide some sort of explanation, at least in a footnote, unless the significance of the name in question is evident from the context.
Perhaps you have interviewed a particular individual, or conducted a study of music in a particular venue, institution, company or small community. You may be so familiar with those people, places and their names that introductions seem superfluous to you. Readers, on the other hand, are unlikely to be familiar with those names. Consequently you must explain the identity and relevance of each potentially unfamiliar name the first time it appears in your text.
If your work is of a theoretical or methodological character, you may have to give readers a clear idea of what you mean by quite broad terms in general usage. However, if, for example, it were necessary to discuss the meanings of popular, music, and popular music, you would not need to concoct your own definitions: you could refer to (or quote from) existing attempts to explain the terms, and reshape those explanations to fit the requirements of your work. Other, less general terms that you may be using in a specific way and which recur in your text may also require definition in a similar manner.
The next sentence raises at least ten questions.
The best way of dealing with these obvious problems is to state quite clearly at the outset what you mean by grunge and indie and to define these terms generically or stylistically. Similarly, if you intend to set up a dichotomy between rock and pop, it would be helpful for the reader to know, at least approximately, where you think the dividing line goes between the two. In addition, if you intend to use the word poppy as an adjective meaning `like pop', then you would be well advised to state this the first time you use it, for example, in a footnote (see See Footnotes and endnotes.).
Each of the three labels rock, rock 'n' roll, and rock and roll can have its own meaning, distinct from the other two. If you are using any of these terms, ensure that the reader knows what you mean by each of them.
Questions 2 and 10 under 5.2.2.2, above, raise the issues of sound and feel. Beat belongs to the same category of totally ambiguous concepts that almost everyone in popular music studies sees fit to use uncritically. This problem is discussed in the handout Introductory Notes to Popular Music Semiotics.
Some genre and style names mean different things in different parts of the world. For example, although the tango is highly popular in Finland, as well as in Brazil and Argentina, all three nationally defined sets of tango practices are quite different musically, choreographically and in terms of social function. Similarly, it is as misleading to talk about African music as it is silly to refer to European music as if it were all one and the same thing.13 Please be precise about which music you mean.
Another ethnocentric, specifically Anglocentric, problem of genre definitions concerns the word country . Since Bosnia, China, Chile, the USA and many other nations all have country music in the sense of music originating in rural rather than urban areas, it is ethnocentric to assume that country music automatically means the musical practices of a particular part of the population originally associated with a particular region of a particular nation (the rural white working class in certain parts of the US South). If you mean that particular type of country music, use the term Country (with a capital c). For further problems of ethnocentricity in English-language writing on popular music, see See Genre names.; See US and USA..
Despite this obvious, general and global use of the word dance, many devotees of the UK's rave-related subcultures seem to use dance to signify no more than music associated with those subcultures. By so doing, they unilaterally disqualify waltz, polka, jig, jive, chalga, salsa, samba, cúmbia, cueca, trepak, etc., etc. as dance -- a highly dubious and ethnocentric restriction of the word.
If you still want to call the kind of 1990s music played in such clubs as Liverpool's Cream dance rather than anything else, you must convincingly explain why you have chosen to apply so restrictive a definition of the word in your assignment. If you mean music associated with UK youth club culture of the 1990s, perhaps you'd better use a more precise term to cover what you mean. Otherwise you will need to state your narrow definition of dance at the outset, to redefine it if you revert to its usual meaning, to define it again if you go back to the restrictive meaning, etc., etc. It may also be advisable to distinguish between Dance, with a capital D for the restrictive meaning, and dance, with a lower-case D for `dance' in its usual sense (see See Exceptions.).
There is nothing wrong with expressing your own opinions or values. On the contrary, personal opinions and values are essential in motivating anyone to write with conviction about any topic. However , it is quite another matter to state opinions as if they were irrefutable fact, or to slip them into your text as though there could be no other view of the issue than your own.
Although everyone reading your text will hopefully disapprove of murder, rape, neglect, greed, destruction, dishonesty, abuse of power, etc., it is unreasonable to assume that all readers will share your musical tastes or your opinions about particular social or cultural phenomena. Consider, for example, the following statement, written by someone who clearly hates rock music from the 1970s.
Whoever wrote this sentence assumes either that no-one can possibly disagree with his/her personal view of seventies rock, or that those who disagree with that view deserve no consideration. The first assumption is illusory and uninformed, the second one arrogant and disrespectful.
Another common trait of opinionated writing is the use of derogatory quotation marks and deprecatory turns of phrase .
Even assuming that rock aesthetics have been discussed in some detail before its appearance, the previous sentence will fail to convert readers to the author's opinion. Putting aesthetic and intellectual between quotes does not magically cancel the usual value of those words, nor will an intelligent reader be slow to wonder why a dreamt-up concoction of clichés should be a more accurate appraisal of the phenomenon than, say, a carefully reasoned set of precepts.
It is reasonable to assume that everyone reading your text will strongly approve of peace, love, kindness, concern, care, generosity, honesty, equality, reason, mutual respect, empowerment, emancipation, etc. It is, however, not reasonable to assume that readers share your musical tastes or your opinions about particular social or cultural phenomena. In fact, assumptions about shared positive values are even more common than illusory assumptions about negative value judgements. Here are some examples.
You should never assume that readers agree with your ideas or share your tastes. Indeed, the purpose of a piece of academic writing is not to preach to a small group of fellow converts but to convince a much wider readership outside your own personal community of taste that what you are trying to communicate is valid, reasonable and important.14 Unsubstantiated value judgements are more liable to act like a red rag to a bull and to discourage self-respecting readers from taking your text seriously.
When marking the sentences included under the two value judgement subsections above, I would almost certainly put red rings round bombastic, self importance, `aesthetic', dreamt-up, concoction, `intellectual', clichés, really good, much more interesting, superb, careful, perfect, much better and marvellous. I would probably also scribble `who says?' in the margin, not because I think there is no validity at all in the opinions expressed but for three more serious reasons:
Ignoring these three considerations may be standard practice if you are working in corporate marketing, or as a trendy pop journalist, or if your work in any other way entails opinionated posturing and hype. Otherwise, unless you have clearly shown, for example, that most 1970s rock was in fact considered bombastic and self-important by the majority of a specified population, or unless you clarify whose opinion you are expressing, the statement is unacceptable in an essay or dissertation. Just imagine readers who (unlike myself) adore Elton John or The Rolling Stones after Sticky Fingers. Even worse, imagine readers (like myself) who thoroughly enjoy the music of artists like Lynyrd Skynyrd or AC/DC. This respect of readers' tastes and opinions, whether you agree with them or not, means that you have to be very precise about whose opinion (e.g. your own) you are stating and about what is being praised or criticised by whom for which reasons.
In short, value judgements and swashbuckling invective combined with intellectual laziness may have its place in certain types of journalism and political or commercial propaganda, but such scribal sleight of hand is counterproductive when writing for readers who hopefully see themselves as critical, intelligent and independent human-beings rather than as malleable consumers of opinion, trends and fads.
Since it is usually impossible to present incontrovertible evidence supporting your opinion, you will have to use intersubjectivity as a means of qualifying the generality of your value judgement. You can present intersubjective qualification of your opinion in one or more of the following ways:
Failing these three procedures, you can, if you still insist on stating your own opinion rather than demonstrating its validity, resort to phrases like In my opinion or It seems to me or I think, etc. However, beware of It seems and It appears (without the to me), as well of It could be argued and Arguably, because these expressions beg the same questions as those at the start of this section: it `seems' or `appears' to whom according to which arguments on which basis?
Similar difficulties arise when referring to the perceived connotative qualities of particular styles or pieces of music, even if no value judgement is intended. For example, there is no certainty that readers will automatically agree with you that the music you are describing as `ethereal' or `rough' is in their experience ethereal or rough, unless, of course, those words, or similar descriptors, are generally and explicitly applied to the music in question. In cases like this you have to resort to one of three strategies: (i) provide intersubjective evidence that the majority of a given population do in fact hear the music as ethereal or rough; (ii) provide a short hermeneutic or semiotic discussion, using musematic analysis; (iii) make it clear that the descriptive words involved are no more than your own personal perception of the music's character. For more information on this problem, see handout Introductory Notes to the Semiotics of Popular Music.
Since the whole idea of writing should ideally be to convince the reader that what you say is right and true, you should ideally state your questions and hypotheses first, then your evidence (both for and against), waiting until the end before putting forward your evaluations and conclusions. It is in other words both illogical and bad tactics to present conclusions and evaluations before evidence and arguments substantiating those conclusions and evaluations. The order of presentation (though not necessarily of initial writing) for each section of your text, as well as for the work as a whole, should, as stated earlier, be (i) question or problem, (ii) evidence and discussion, (iii) conclusions. If you start (a section of) your work with an unsubstantiated opinion or questionable statement, even though you go on to convincingly document the validity of that point of view, you will rub the reader up the wrong way and spoil your chances of getting your message across.
Once you have decided how to structure your written work, it is important that you make it perfectly clear to the reader where one section ends and another starts. Headings and subheadings are a useful tool in this quest for comprehensibility and structuring. They can be inserted at points in your writing where there is a clear change of topic or approach. (See also See General.).
Once your work is structured into its sections with their headings, it is important that the reader be notified as to how contiguous sections are linked. To put this matter in the form of a simple question, does what we are about to read relate to what has just preceded it in a `more-of-the-same-thing' way or is it a matter of `and now for something different'? If the latter is true, it helps the reader to know why the text veers off in another direction. If the former is true, readers will probably find your text easier to follow if you tell them which kind of `more-of-the-same-thing' relationship you intend. For example, is what you are about to write another illustration of the same thing (e.g. `Another example of this tendency is'...) or yet another example (e.g. `Moreover') or the final example (e.g. `Finally'...)? Such episodic markers should prevent your text from reading like avant-garde poetry, trendy pop journalism, loose chat or an unstructured stream of consciousness.
It is therefore good practice to end each section with a sentence or two summarising what you have just written and pointing towards what comes next. You can also link back to the previous section when starting on a new tack. This is quite helpful to the reader because text flow is visibly interrupted at paragraph changes, even more so at the start of a new section. Once again, the question to ask is `how does what I'm about to write now relate to what came just before and to what comes next?'
If what you are about to write is in contrast or opposition to what preceded it, or if the new sentence presents a counter-argument to, or a different side of, whatever came just before, comprehension can be aided by starting the new sentence with such words or phrases as:
On the other hand, if you are piling on the arguments or evidence and if what you are about to write treads the same basic path as whatever immediately preceded it, you can always clarify this relationship of complementarity or additionality between sentences or paragraphs by using such words or phrases as:
If what you are about to write sums up or expresses in a different way what you have just written, it can be useful to start a sentence with words or phrases like:
Another aid to comprehension and easy reading is to count the number of issues or examples you are about to raise in the (next section of your) text and to insert a sentence before you start that multiple account, saying something like The problem can be approached in three ways or This tendency can be illustrated using the following six examples. Then follows the actual enumerative text in which you let readers know how far the count has reached:
The first way of approaching this problem is to ...
The third approach to the same problem attempts to ...
The sixth and final example shows how ...
If you are presenting a series of short arguments, each of these can be enumerated with adverbial markers, e.g:
There are three problems with this approach. Firstly, the author ignores the fact that ... Secondly, there is an intrinsic contradiction between ... Thirdly, the empirical evidence presented above clearly shows ...
Another way of enumerating short points in your text is to insert numerals (either lower case Roman or standard Arabic) between brackets at the start of each point.
There are three problems with this approach: (i) the author ignores the fact that ...; (ii) there is an intrinsic contradiction between ...; (iii) the empirical evidence presented above clearly shows ...
If the points are longer or in need of particular emphasis, you can lay them out as a list:
The three main problems with Author X's approach can be summarised as follows:
1. X ignores the fact that ...
2. There is an intrinsic contradiction between ...
3. The empirical evidence presented above clearly refutes ...
As the writer of your essay or dissertation, you will have spent far more time with your work than anyone reading it. You also know your own thoughts and intentions with what you have written far better than any reader. However, do not expect readers to double as your mind readers. One way to avoid this problem of communication is to provide the reader with references within your work. Obviously, a long work will need much more internal cross-referencing than a short assignment.
Comprehension can be facilitated by referring back to statements you have already made in the same text. In the next example, you (the writer) have assumed that the reader will have remembered that you demonstrated the falsehood of a particular statement eight pages earlier.
Nevertheless, it is often said that music is universal language. Since this statement is false, it will be necessary to ...
The reader stops and thinks `just a minute, I don't agree with that at all!' The problem could have easily been avoided if you had written as follows.
Nevertheless, music is still often characterised as a universal language. The problem here is, as I have already shown (pp. x-y), that music cannot be regarded as either universal or a language. Therefore, it will be necessary to ...
Sometimes you may need to refer briefly to something that you have not yet discussed in full. For example, if you are discussing a point using arguments or findings from later on in your account and it is not clear that those matters will in fact be dealt with, readers may either become confused or start asking themselves how you can be so bold when what you claim has yet to be proved. The following refutation of `common sense' is, for example, unacceptable.
It is often said that music is universal language. Since this statement is completely false, it will be necessary to ...
Who says the statement is completely false? Maybe readers think it is absolutely true. If you intend to prove the statement as false later on in your text, the problem is easily overcome by writing something along the following lines.
It is often said that music is a universal language. However, since, as will become evident from the subsequent discussion, it is impossible to regard music as a language in the strict sense of the term or as universal in any sense, it will instead be necessary to ...
If you use a forwards link you have to ensure that there is in fact something substantial in the subsequent text to which you can refer!
You will probably be very familiar with your own work, including all its appendices, music examples, figures, tables, transcriptions, etc. Your readers, including those marking your work, will not be so familiar. If you refer, for example, to a passage in a transcription or graphic score, your reference should include the bar number or elapsed time indicating the exact location of the passage in question.18 Special procedures apply to in-text referencing of books and articles (see See Bibliography.), recordings (See Musical works.; See Audiovisual references.), and web sites (See Internet sites (URLs).).
Link words and phrases can be divided into eight main semantic categories:
All these words and expressions are reasonably precise in their denotation of how consecutive statements, sentences and paragraphs can be interlinked.
It is unwise to start sentences with `And', `But' or `So' since these words do not always establish a precise relationship between the new sentence or paragraph in construction and whatever preceded it (see See `And', `but', `or' and `so'.).
Badly constructed sentences are without doubt the most common cause of confusion, ambiguity and irritation in texts submitted by students. Consider, for example, the following sentence I had to read a few years ago. Only the names have been changed to protect the author's identity.
The four serious problems of comprehension in this sentence are as follows.
Perusing the sentence several times -- an unnecessary and annoying task for any reader, let alone for your marker or examiner --, it sometimes becomes clear that whoever wrote the sentence did not manage to write what they really meant to put across. The reasons behind the clumsiness of the sentence are (i) bad punctuation (see See Punctuation, capitalisation and italics.); (ii) ambiguous pronominal referencing (see See Pronominal referencing.), (iii) abominable sentence construction, the main problem being too many simple conjunctions (`and' and `but') giving rise to no less than five (5) separate main verbs.
The following sentence probably expresses whatever was originally meant by the sentence criticised above. This rewritten sentence, with its six verbs, is both comprehensible and grammatically correct because it only contains one main verb. Can you spot the single (one and only) main verb?
The six verbs are: (i) have argued, (ii) is, (iii) recorded, (iv) being noted, (v) produced and (vi) earning. The only main verb, however, is is (as in there is unquestionably a core element). Is is the main verb for five reasons. (i) ... have argued... is part of the initial subordinate clause, starting with Although; (ii) recorded is a past participle (verbal adjective) qualifying songs; (iii) being noted is a present participle attached to the relative pronoun who (referring to TakkiTrax); (iv) ...have produced... is contained within the relative subordinate clause starting with who; (v) earning is a present participle directly attached to tracks which, in its turn, is subordinate to the relative clause starting with who (referring to TakkiTrax). In other words, although the second example constitutes quite a complex sentence including six verbs, it causes no ambiguity of meaning because it is correctly constructed by virtue of its sole main verb. In short, it is not the length of a sentence that makes for difficult reading but how that sentence is constructed. If you are uncertain about main verbs, subordinate clauses, etc., read up on some English grammar or keep to short sentences.