The Introduction: APA recommendations

I was looking back over what the APA (American Psychological Association) Publication
Manual has to say about Introductions in preparation for a meeting with a writer tomorrow. As an aid to my own understanding, and because I need something to write about here, I figured I'd just make a few notes about what they say. I think these notes, while not entirely applicable to dissertations that aren't structured around an empirical study, provide some good insight into what readers are looking for--for what the APA thinks is worth asking for in introductions.

As an aside, the APA Manual also has a good section on what to put in abstracts (pp. 12-15) that is also worth reading, even if you're trying to write an introduction, because an introduction and an abstract are attempting to do very similar things: they are where the reader starts; they are what draws the reader in.

Ok, so I'm using section 1.08 of the 5th edition of The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, pp. 15-17.

The APA Manual breaks section 1.08 into three parts, which, if we want, we can also take as a basic outline for an Introduction--each part of the Manual's section 1.08 corresponds to a section of the Introduction. The three parts are titled: "Introduce the problem;" "Develop the Background;" and "State the Purpose and Rationale." The character of each part, I think, is basically apparent from the title of the section, but these section titles wouldn't really work as section titles in an actual introduction. Instead, one might have sections titled "Statement of Problem," "Background" (or "Literature Review"), and "Purpose and Rationale of the Study."

The first section, "Introduce the problem" says:

Before writing the introduction consider

• Why is this problem important?
• How do the hypothesis and the experimental design relate to the problem?
• What are the theoretical implications of the study, and how does the study relate to previous work in the area?
• What theoretical propositions are tested, and how were they derived?

A good introduction answers these questions...and, by summarizing the relevant arguments and the data, gives the reader a firm sense of what was done and why. (p. 16)

We can see in that terminal phrase--"what was done and why?"--a call for an explicit statement of purpose. At the least, I read it that way; regular readers of this blog have probably noted that I talk about sense of purpose a lot.

The four bulleted questions do not necessarily represent sections of the first section of the introduction (the "Statement of Problem"), but they could be, because that section is setting up all that comes after, and before getting into the details of a literature review, one wants to give the reader a complete sense of "what was done and why", so that the details of the literature review are framed in terms of the purpose of the project.

The "Develop the background" section opens with the sentences "Discuss the literature, but do not include an exhaustive historical review. Assume that the reader is knowledgeable about the field for which you are writing and does not require a complete digest" (p. 16).
What this means to me is: keep the details down, except with respect to those details that are directly related to your study. For example, if you are using a two variables, you need only discuss details of those variables that are related to how the two variables might interact, and not details about how each variable interacts with all other variables. (I think that last sentence doesn't really make sense; I apologize; I want to move on.)

Finally, the "State the purpose and rationale." Have I ever said anything about the value of an explicit statement of purpose? Ok, so here my claim is seconded.

Anyway, if you happen to be writing an APA paper, taking a look at section 1.08 of the manual can be of great help: it provides a model for what is expected.

If you don't have a manual of your own, and don't want to check the library (it's only two pages of reading), it's worth thinking about what the three tasks assigned to the introduction by the APA: "Introduce the problem;" "Develop the Background;" and "State the Purpose and Rationale." How is your paper going to accomplish these three things in the introduction? I think that every academic work wants to do something of the sort in its introduction, whether we're talking about the introduction to a chapter or to a book/dissertation. The introduction is where the foundation is laid for the rest o the argument; it is akin to the statement of axioms prior to the beginning of a logical proof. The introduction says what you're looking for, how you're going to look for it, and what kinds of evidence you're going to consider. This is a paradigm that any paper can follow.

If, for example, one is writing a paper in history the introduction might say (1) what the temporal parameters are, and what kind of development you're looking at (whether those are changes in a population (e.g. US expatriates in the 1920s), a process (e.g., agriculture) or type of object (e.g., furniture)), (2) what is your philosophical/theoretical lens (how do you define the task of the historian? Are you e.g., a Marxist theorist)?, and (3) what general primary evidence you will be using (actually, this last may be unnecessary for many fields like history or literature where what is considered acceptable evidence is so well accepted that no discussion of it is necessary).

Like yesterday, I think I could say more, and maybe will, but not right now, got other things to do...

Feedback cycles

Recently I've been thinking a lot about writing in terms of iterated feedback cycles. Basically, the writing of a dissertation or thesis can be seen through the lens of the fundamental interaction between the writer and the committee, and especially the advisor/chair.

The committee chair is expected (required, really) to give the writer feedback and guidance in the move towards completion. It doesn't always work out so well. Even so, I recommend working under the assumption that what you want to do is to create a useful feedback loop.

This can be done by the simple expedient of turning work that is basically complete. I don't necessarily mean completely edited and proofread and formatted, nor do I even mean with all problems resolved and no questions of how to develop the material. I really mean complete in terms of the structure of the paper.

A structurally complete paper has an introduction and a conclusion. It dedicates space to defining the basic terms and premises. It presents an idea to be discussed and a purpose for discussing it.

Minor digression here: I often think about the basic five-paragraph essay that everyone (of my generation, at least) was taught to write in elementary school or junior high. There was an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. It's a structure that is pretty roundly dismissed, I think, by composition teachers now. But I think it's elegant, and provides a basic model for what all writing is trying to accomplish.

All writing--fiction, speech writing, essays, etc.--starts with something that is supposed to draw the reader in and orient them in some way. A writer of fiction tries to draw the reader in differently than does the speech writer or the essayist, but still the writer of fiction wishesthe reader to know what the book is about. (aside: for any who believe that "different/differently" must always be paired with "from", I disagree. As I write to be understood, and as I seriously doubt that the sentence is hard to understand, I pooh-pooh the scorn of any prescriptive grammarian who thinks it "wrong." I could continue this digression with references, but really...back to our main story.) "Call me Ishmael," opens Moby Dick, thus informing the reader that the whole book will somehow be about this person Ishmael. Fiction writers don't always want their reader to understand the full import of the orientation, but yet their words orient the reader, nonetheless. Brave New World opens with the sentence fragment: "A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories." The sentence orients the reader to the fundamental oppressive dystopian vision. (and a big raspberry to all the petty grammarians out there who are appalled by such casual use of language as Huxley's incomplete sentence.)

Similarly, all pieces of writing have some ending, something that wraps up the work and leaves the reader with some sense of what the work was about. In the case of expository writing, this tends to be some statement of what you have shown and the conclusions that you draw from it--the moral of the story, if you will.

And, of course, there's something in between the beginning and the end.
A complete piece will have all of these.
If, then, you submit a work that is structurally complete, your reader can read it and has to be able to explain why it's not complete, and thus give you feedback on the content and other aspects of the writing. If it is complete, you're begging to have your reader say "it's not complete."

I'm maybe going to say more about this later, but I got off on digressions and now have to run off...

Significance

I had a writer today ask me about finding the significance of her work.

Thinking about it, it seems like significance is context-dependent, or rather viewer-dependent. What counts as significant depends on point of view. We all, I imagine, have memories of feeling a deep significance in somethings that we just wouldn't worry about now. Those are situations where our view of significance changes; they should give us some insight into the basic truth that the significance that we place on something is not the same that others will.

That being said, I think that we can recognize a number of different levels at which we can find significance for a work, or at least these levels are levels at which we can seek to find significance.

Personal Significance. The obvious first place to seek significance is for yourself. If you don't feel that a work has any significance, then it can be mighty difficult to persevere, especially at the times that the project seems difficult. This is the sense of purpose that should drive the work. There are different types of personal significance: there is simple interest and curiosity; or, by contrast, there is also the personal significance of the crusader. There are probably other flavors of this, but I don't want to pursue that too far.

Academic Significance. As an academic writer, an obvious place to look for significance is within the academic community and the academic discourse. Are there publications that address similar issues as you hope to look at? Are there any publications that call for the kind of research that you hope to do? Are there authors whose work might be supplemented or challenged by your work?

Political Significance. An academic writer might also be concerned with the possibility that their work might shape political discourse in some way. There's some overlap here with the next type of significance.

Practical/Policy/Protocol Significance. Does the research tell us about the way we do things? If we carry out a research project, what does it show us about how we do do things--are we doing them well? And is there any way we could do them better?

Are there other types of significance I've missed? Quite possibly. In truth I'm rushing a little o get something written after missing yesterday, but I don't really feel like spending a lot of time on this right now. Hence, a short post; but better a bad post on time than a good post late.

Avoiding a Battle of Wills

I don't advocate getting into a battle of wills with your faculty committee; it makes the process much more difficult. But at the same time, it's important to be able to adhere to your own sense of purpose, and your own sense of what the project ought to be.

This is one of the most difficult pieces of the dissertation project to manage: how much of your vision are you willing to sacrifice to the demands or suggestions of your committee? How much do you want to respond to instructions of your committee when they call on you to do work that you would not have done?

The answer, of course, is not simple. It's always a matter of judgment calls. First off, is that comment that says "include a discussion of X" or the one that says "cut out section Y"--are those comments demands or suggestions? You have to judge with respect to your committee. But I think it is easy for a graduate student to forget that sometimes professors ask questions or make suggestions because they want to help.

I remember clearly being stopped part way through my qualifying orals. I don't remember exactly what the subject was, and I'm not quite sure which professor it was who spoke first, but she said to me something like "We're asking the question because we're trying to help you plan your dissertation, not because we're trying to find out a weakness." So one thing to ask yourself when looking at those comments is, are they demands or suggestions?

The next thing to do is to examine whether or not that comment really helps. And to do this, you have to have a good idea of what you're trying to accomplish with your dissertation, because without such a sense of purpose, how can you determine whether the comment helps or not? It is crucial to put aside any resentment at being ordered around, and just examine the suggestion on its own merits: if the suggestion helps you--and I emphasize 'you'--that doesn't mean that you'll be able to recognize its value immediately; you have to give the idea at least a little chance--though only within the crucible of your scholarly analysis. Some suggestions really do help. If you can see that a suggestion helps, then you want to use it.

Some suggestions don't really help. These ones you need to figure out how to manage. One good tactic is to simply ignore them. If you turn in a completely revised draft that's significantly different from the previous one; if that draft incorporates some of the suggestions that your professor made; and if that draft is focused, coherent and generally complete in its structure, then it is quite possible that your professor will evaluate that draft on its own merits, and not on the basis of comments written some months earlier.

Another possible strategy is to use the handy "that is outside the scope of this discussion." I was talking today with a Berkeley Professor of education who was telling me how he had shown a draft to a friend, how that friend had taken him to task on a certain issue, and how he had decided to respond by putting in a footnote that acknowledged the difficulty and said "but that is outside the scope of this discussion." As he said to me: one does not wish to appear ignorant of the subject, or the issue, but opening the discussion is like opening Pandora's box: all sorts of problems come out. His "Pandora's box" is parallel to the rabbit holes that I was talking about. But he's right, in a way: going into that discussion actually does create many problems, and given the desire for concise and focused work, even exploration of interesting subjects is something of a problem. We may be able to convincingly respond to a suggestion by writing a paragraph that acknowledges a body of material that is relevant, but is outside the scope of the study.

It's possible that the suggestions I have made above can help resolve the great majority of problems with comments and suggestions from your committee that you find difficult. It seems to me likely that this strategy, repeated over a couple of cycles of feedback and revision, might be successful in avoiding direct conflict. If you are able to respond positively to some of the suggestions, that always helps defuse difficulties related to failing to respond to all of the comments.

Framing (2)

Sarah asks:

I'm looking back at my text and thinking to myself "I have 9 pages of revised single spaced text (with several more to follow) and no where in here do I feel I have shared with my reader why this long digression in detail is important."

When should we tell the readers about our framing? How often do we need to remind them of it? What are some graceful and tactful ways of doing this without it feeling out of place?

The most important place for framing is right near the beginning. It seems to me that you want your reader to know the general purpose and context of your work right from the start. As I said yesterday, this framing is related to the sense of purpose, and I have previously (on Aug. 18, in a post titled "Sense of Purpose: Explicit statements") noted how these explicit statements of purpose are placed in the preface--that is to say the first piece the reader is to read. This is true for the entire work, and it's true for pieces of the larger work: as you begin a new section, you frame that section within its context.

You might start an entire work saying "Our goal is to trace the history of X, in order to better understand what X is like today." Or maybe "The goal of this work is to trace the history of X, in order to provide an example of the general process Y." Or, to take an example from a book I revere: "The following essay is written in the conviction that anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemology, and for the philosophy of science." (From Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. The italics are Feyerabend's.) Of course, when you start a work, the need to frame it is greatest.
When you are beginning a section of a larger work, you want to frame that section in terms of the larger work. This can be done by explaining to the reader the transition and flow of the work. For example: "This section discusses issues related to a specific aspect of X." Or "Having defined the basic parameters of X, we will look at some of the effects of process Y on X." Or maybe "In order to discuss X, we need to take a look at what came before X; therefore we must first examine W, which will serve as a foil for X."
To return to Sarah's question, as you open those nine pages, do you reference the main question of your study? Do you reference the section that comes before those nine pages? Do you discuss what will follow those nine pages? If not, then I suggest adding a couple of sentences to tell the reader right up front something like "The history of the ABC commission played a crucial role in the development of the 123 department, which set the general parameters for who would be counted as receiving DEF benefits." This kind of statement only comes at the beginning of a section that is, in a way a self-contained unit in the larger work. This kind of framing requires your having a sense of actual purpose for including the discussion: why did you choose to include this discussion in your work? What does this specific discussion--whether it be a discussion of an event, of a theory, of a term, a person, etc.--what purpose does this discussion have in the context of the larger work?

Beyond that opening statement, I think that you want to start to work framing in through the use of simple sentences later in the section and at transitions within the section. As you start to wrap up the section you want to say to the reader stuff like "this detail that we just discussed is one of the key factors in stuff that I'm going to tell you about later," or maybe "this detail is one of the keys in understanding the stuff I discussed in the previous chapter."

Good methods of framing often rely on mentioning what has just been discussed or what will next be discussed in relation to the current section: how does this section relate to what comes before and after? What is the transition and what the logic? If you just finished discussing theory A and you're currently discussing theory B, how do those theories compare to each other? Are they in conflict or in agreement? where are they alike and where similar? If you framed the previous section well, then you can frame the current section in terms of the previous section. If you are trying to frame the current section with respect to what will come next, it helps to make some reference back to the main question, too.

How often do you need to remind the reader? I think the answer to that is: whenever the link starts to seem tenuous. I know that's not really clear. But what I'm thinking of is that sometimes, as we write about a subject we've been thinking about, it is easy to make leaps of reasoning and follow them--those are the places the reader gets lost. So, if you're working to tie your chain of reasoning together so the reader can follow it, then a lot of framing will naturally develop.

The most important framing of all is in your head: you, the writer, need to be able to explain to yourself what role a given section serves in relating to the main question of your work. If you are framing the ideas yourself--and you write about the things that you see the importance of--then the ideas will naturally come out framed.

If you want to show, for example, how the development of enumeration practices in government, business and charity, led to an entire segment of the population suffering from a series of problems, then each discussion of government policy, of business practice, of theory, etc., will naturally be imbued with framing because you, the writer, will be motivated. If you discuss a government commission, it will be because that commission had an impact in some way; if you discuss a theory, it is because that theory shaped some aspects of the phenomenon you're studying, and so on.

As a final note, the hardest things to frame are things that you need to include to satisfy others. In my dissertation, I was primarily interested in ideas of science and the practical implications of these ideas and how to improve on those ideas given things that we've learned about human cognition. But I included discussion of architectural aesthetics largely at the prompting of my committee; I was interested in the aesthetic questions, and I had a lot to say about them, but it was not quite as directly germane to my main sense of purpose, and so framing it was very difficult. One can't just drop the material in and say "oh by the way: here's 20 pages on some tangential issue," or at least it doesn't feel confident. I guess in such situations, I would recommend making sure that you have a strong vision of what you would like to include, and then it becomes easier, at least, to encapsulate difficult material, or to maybe work in little bits of it in unobtrusive manners, perhaps as a subtheme.

Framing

Internet phenomena fascinate me. I certainly don't study them, and the general study of such phenomena (and the consequent understanding that would come) might well avail me, but it's not really my bag. I'm more interested in thinking through ideas related to writing and communication and how to do it.

One thing that I notice in internet phenomena, especially internet searches is how quickly things come to be taken out of context, or how the context gets lost.

For example, there is a page on the site Technorati that
presents the matter of my blog in an odd way. While it does basically represent what is going on in my blog, context is lost. Look, in particular, at the section "what this blog is about", which uses the labels of my posts to create a display of topics. The four topics that dominate the list are consistency, emotions, practice, sense of purpose. And I do talk about those often. The problem is that what is completely lost is the framing I provide at the top of my blog: "Seeking insightful perspectives on writing, dissertations, and projects in general." I talk about consistency, etc., but in the context of writing. I'm not writing about emotions; I'm writing about the role that emotions play in writing.

This notion of maintaining the framing is a good one for writers to keep in mind. When presenting a long and detailed exposition to readers, it behooves the writer to make sure that the framing is well done, so that the reader understands and can readily remember why the details are being discussed.
But having once framed something in the context of your main topic, you do not need to talk about your main topic explicitly. After all, we want to assume that our readers are not idiots and they can remember our basic purpose.

The framing is crucial: without it, our meaning is lost on the reader.
The framing is set by your sense of purpose: your sense of purpose is what sets your focus, and it is that focus which determines the scope and direction of the work.

Counting

What Counts?
I'm thinking, in this case, particularly about what to count as "work accomplished", but it's a very interesting general question as well, because deciding "what counts" is a crucial decision.

Consider, for example, the United States Constitution in one of its darker moments:
Article 1, Section 2, paragraph 3: "Representatives...shall be apportioned among the several States...according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free persons,...and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons."
Indians not taxed counted not at all in determining representation of the new federal government. "Other persons" counted 60% in determining numbers of representatives, but of course those other persons didn't get 60% of a vote, being slaves.

It's nice and dandy to think of numbers as objective. It's one of the lovely myths of science. But what we choose to count is determined by how we see the world. What gets counted depends on our subjective decisions concerning what to count. This is true whether we are a physical scientist looking data sets and trying to decide whether some data can be considered outliers, or whether we are social scientist trying to decide whether certain data are coded as one thing or as another, or whether we are a politician trying to decide who to count as eligible with respect to some policy. It is inevitable that a value-laden subjective determination is made considering what counts.

While I mention this as a general principle that all academics ought to be aware of, my real concern here is in thinking about writers and how writers can sabotage themselves. I had a writer lament to me the other day "I didn't get much done; I only wrote abut 2000 words." When I wrote back "That's great 2000 words is a considerable piece of work and if you keep up a pace like that you'll finish in no time," I got a response "Actually I only wrote about 1000 words."

Well, we all have to figure out what to count. It's easy to count the words that we have written: lots of word-processing software will do it for us. It's not so easy to count if we start saying "well, these words do count, but those don't." But the determination is ours: we have to make the subjective decision of what counts before we can start enumerating.

But I wasn't so much concerned with counting words, as I was with counting effort and counting progress. The effort we put in, and the progress we make are not perfectly measured in the number of words we write. I think that writers with writer's block and related problems often suffer from not being willing or able to count what they did as actual work or actual progress.

It's important to learn to celebrate the fruits of our efforts, and even more important to learn to count the fruits as actual fruits. If we spend a day of hard work, thinking through difficult problems and then say to ourselves "I got nothing done because I didn't write enough words," we are counting our effort as worthless. And what kind of emotional state does such a method of counting lead to? It leads to depression, one can easily imagine.

Dr. David Burns, M.D., author of the mass-market book on CBT titled Feeling Good, argues that there are "ten cognitive distortions that form the basis of all your depressions" (p.32). Number four on his list of cognitive distortions is "Disqualifying the Positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they 'don't count' for some reason or other" (p.42). While I have reservations about any mass-market book on psychology, and don't know that I would accept Burns' contention that all depression stems from his ten cognitive distortions, I do believe that if we engage in his cognitive distortions we are creating a strong negative emotional state. If we reject our efforts as not counting, then each day that we make an effort, and each day we discount the effort of the day, we add to our negative feelings about ourselves and about our project.

It seems, therefore, important to be able to celebrate the effort, and to celebrate the actual progress that we do make, even if it isn't as much as we would have hoped. And in that celebration we definitely don't want to focus on the idea that it wasn't as much as we hoped.

In the long-term practice of writing it is crucial to be able to have days where the productivity seems low, and not berate ourselves for those days. Writing, like many practices, is uneven--some days go well, some go badly; sometimes we make a lot of progress in an easy, measurable sense. Sometimes we make progress by having some sort of epiphany--even sometimes when that epiphany leads us to want to throw away some old writing that we had previously intended to use. Writing is about creating a working whole: a complete, coherent written work. Some of the progress necessary in that endeavor will involve re-arranging ideas we had earlier in the process before we knew what we have learned during the process.

Finally, I want to note that yes, sometimes we get nothing done. Some days we don't try. Some days we may sit down and write nothing, or write a load of tripe that doesn't contribute to the project. It's okay to admit that you had an unproductive day. But it seems to me superior to try to focus--everyday--on the positive accomplishments, and to remember to count them and celebrate them. That whole load of tripe?: well at least you learned that that wasn't what your dissertation needed. Deciding what to count is a practice in itself; it's nice when we can get the practice to support us.