More Advice on Writing - from Tom

Advice on writing the TMAs for this course


Importance of writing argumentative essays

1. Make use of the activities on the dvd-rom. These are designed to help you think critically about the material and to develop your own perspectives on it
2. Your aim is to produce essays that provide your own answer to the question, by deploying arguments and evidence designed to convince the reader of the strength of your position. Following on from this a couple of health warnings

a. Beware anecdotes: it can be very tempting to back up arguments you are making by giving direct examples from your experience. But bear in mind that while an experience you’ve had may give you a compelling reason to feel a certain way about something, if your reader hasn’t experienced it, it does not give them a compelling reason. Only use evidence that you can reasonably expect your reader to accept. For example:
“In the last 30 years the average intelligence of OU tutors has been steadily declining, according to a study conducted by Sheffield University” is much more plausible to write in an essay than “ I’ve been doing OU courses since the 1970s, and I’m sure the tutors are getting worse.” This latter argument is not very good because it may not be at all representative of what’s going on in the OU. It may simply reflect the fact that you’ve been progressively less lucky with your allocation of tutors over the years, or that as you do more courses and learn more, tutors become less and less impressive to you.

The exception to this rule is if you do have specialist knowledge, for example you might have worked for Open University recruitment for 30 years and checked the CVs of thousands of applications. You might then be able to say with considerable authority that (say) the average educational achievement of OU tutors has declined over a period.

b. The opposite extreme (and more common) problem is that you simply write essays which describe the course content. “According to Fred, x is the case, according to Jane, y is the case. To conclude: there is a disagreement amongst academics as to whether x or y is the case”. This is to be avoided! It is your job to take a view on the question you have been asked, and to defend that view, making use of the course materials in so doing. You need to do more than simply summarize the various views on the matter. Note too that this means that the view you wish to defend should appear early in the argument. Ideally, you ought to give an indication of your response to the question in the introduction – so your reader knows the position you’ll be defending, and how you plan to go about it. A common problem with essays is that people think that they should describe a lot of course content first, and assess it afterwards. This almost invariably results in your assessment of the material being crowded in to a paragraph at the end. This of course makes your arguments incomplete and ineffectual. Your thoughts should be structuring features of the TMA, not tacked on in the conclusion!

3. Please make sure that you complete Part 2 of the TMA – which asks you to reflect on an aspect of your study habits and approach. This is helpful to you in thinking about how you study, it gives your marker something to respond to and you get penalized if you don’t write something for it…
4. Please make sure you have read the information on referencing and follow it carefully in the essays. In third level courses, adequate referencing is not a ‘would be nice to have’ it’s essential. As a reminder: you need to reference all influence not just direct quotations. If you paraphrase someone’s argument, this needs a reference, if you are drawing facts from someone’s work, this needs a reference. And this is equally true of A/V materials as it is of texts!

a. Referencing A/V items
When referencing A/V items, you should be prepared to give a time in all situations where you would normally give a page number. So you’ll need to jot down the timing of particularly relevant moments in the A/Vs so you can cite them in your essays.

I promised an example of how you can contract references to Audio Visual sources for your in-text citations in the TMA – so they take up less space.

Your first reference to an A/V item should take this form
Author, date, publication title, timing
For example:

(The Open University, 2008a, 'Welcome to the course', 02:38)

Thereafter, any subsequent reference to the ‘Welcome to the course’ video can be shortened to (OU 2008a, then give the relevant timing)

Let’s say the next A/V source you cite is “What Makes Ideas Political”. Again the first reference to it will be in the longer form:

(The Open University, 2008b, “What Makes Ideas Political”, 1.45)

Subsequent references to this source become (OU 2008b timing)

And so on, the next A/V reference becomes 2008c…

Remember, the timings function like page numbers. The timing you give should refer to the part of the audio you are drawing the information from. Just as for references to texts, the page number should point to the precise location of the material you are using.
Enjoy!