1. Don't be pedantic.
 

Many students write as if they are trying to be pedantic, as if they want to sound like stuffy academics or old fogies. Here are some examples:

a. In a broader sense, one might view much of the
history of psychology in terms of the tension generated
by these two seemingly contradictory components of the
human organism, a history that has involved an
oscillation between periods in which the field has
focused primarily on motivational issues and periods in
which it has focused principally on cognitive issues.

b. When irrefutable schema-inconsistent information is
integrated, it will normally elicit a process known as
causal attribution, which basically means that the
perceiver will try to generate a hypothesis which
explains the source of this inconsistent information.

c. Initially construed as an embarrassing error
on the part of the perceiver, illusion came instead to
be, at first a more powerful and exquisitely sensitive
research instrument, and, later, the very hallmark of
the human being's tremendous sophistication in
"creating" knowledge and actively construing reality.

If these sound good to you, you need to retrain your ear.

Never write a word or phrase you wouldn't use in conversation. I doubt you ever would say aloud to anyone "irrefutable schema-inconsistent information" or "these two seemingly contradictory components of the human organism." I'll wager you wouldn't. If not, get rid of them.

Not that writing is merely printed conversation. It isn't. Because you can edit, written language can be much more concise and precise, and so it also tends to be more formal. But it is easy to overdo the formality.

2. Avoid sexist and biased language, but do so unobtrusively.

Review the APA guidelines concerning sexist and biased language.

The unnecessary use of "he" and strange uses of "they" drive me crazy. There is no such thing as the "genderless he." There is evidence that many people interpret the generic "he" (as in "Every student should pick up his paper before leaving.") to refer to males and not to males and females. So, don't use "he" unless you are taking about a specific person or subject.

Don't use "s/he" or "him/herself" or any similar variations. Doing so lazy, and I hate seeing those little slashes. Expressions like "he/she" and "him/herself" are abominations.They are something you would never say aloud and, worse, they call attention to themselves and the sexism they are trying to cure.

Everyday I read sentences like these:

a. The individual can reduce stress placed on his body by proactive coping.
b. If the individual perceives he has no control over the situation, one is likely to feel helpless.
c. For example, in the first stage a child scares him/herself while telling a story about a monster.

Not only are the writers being lazy in terms of avoiding sexist language, the sentences are grammatically incorrect.

Most of the time you can solve the problem by using the plural forms of words. But you must make sure your verbs and nouns agree.If you want to use specific examples, be sure that half of your examples use males and half use females. The final option is to use "he or she." This is a bit painful to the ear, but it is something we could say in a lecture or conversation.

3. Use parrallel construction. Your verbs and nouns must agree. Parts of a series must agree.

The word "Data" is plural. The words "individual" and "one" are not. You are probably saying to yourself, "I know. I'm not stupid." Of course you know, but you'd be amazed at how many papers I read with sentences like these:

a. This would be beneficial to the subject because they would no longer have to suppress emotional thoughts.
b. The findings, behaviors, and changing of ideas across domains of interest cause me to doubt the conclusions.
c. The subject should be questioned to determine if they thought about the film after the experimental session.
d. The consistency of the findings suggest the results are generalizable to children and adults.
e. Long-term adaptation rests on how well the individual effectively copes with the distressing events that happen in their lives.
f. This data could have been examined more thoroughly.
g. There is no indication of how each of these concepts were defined.

4. Check your possessives. Here are some troubling examples of missing or misplaced apostrophes:

a. Ones feelings are important determinants of ones thoughts.
b. Each subjects' response was recorded using a video camera.
c. Those questions are the one's that should be addressed in future research.

5. Get rid of excess verbiage. (As Mark Twain put it, "Eschew surplusage.") Excess verbiage detracts from what you have to say.

6. Never use a heavy, uncommon, or academic word or phrase where a lighter, more common, or plainer word would do.

In academic writing, you need a certain number of technical terms, such as "schema," "mutual exclusivity," "situational," "causal attributions," and "availability," simply to make your theories clear. But these terms also make your writing hard to read. Don't compound the problem by using pedantic words and phrases where you don't need to. Moreover, be sure you are using jargon correctly. The colloquial meaning of words like "experiment," "repressed," "compulsive," "awareness," and "unconscious" often does not match the psychological definition.

7. Divide complicated sentences into more than one sentence.

Again, what you are writing about is hard enough to understand without overly complicated sentences. Get rid of them by cutting them in half or in thirds. Compare these two examples:

Initially construed as an embarrassing error on the part of the perceiver, illusion came instead to be, at first a more powerful and exquisitely sensitive research instrument, and, later, the very hallmark of the human being's tremendous sophistication in "creating" knowledge and actively construing reality.

Take out the junk and here's what you get:

At first, illusions were treated as embarrassing perceptual errors . Later, they were viewed as a powerful research tool and, still later, as the hallmark of human sophistication in creating understanding and construing reality.

Once you have a clear sentence, you can decide whether it is what you want to say.

8. Root out unneeded adjectives and adverbs.

Adjectives and adverbs weigh down a sentence faster than most other expressions, so use them sparingly. Many are redundant, and others put readers to more work than they are worth. In the passage I just revised, I got rid of "more," "exquisitely sensitive," "very," "tremendous," and "actively." The most common offenders are: intensifiers like "very" and "extremely," which usually lead to overstatement; evaluative adjectives like "exciting," "surprising," "important, " and "interesting," which presume on the reader's own judgment; and adverbs like "basically," "essentially," and "simply," which just waste space.
 

9. Make your writing precise and terse.

Use words with a precise meaning rather than those that are vague, for they will make your meaning clear. In particular, prefer concrete words to abstract ones, for they are more likely to have a precise meaning.

10. Use the active voice.

Prefer the active over the passive voice. Why? The active voice is usually more concrete. It forces you to make the subject explicit and doing so makes the sentence more vivid. Compare "when information is integrated" with "when people integrate information."

11. Center your writing, where possible, on people and what they do.

Most academic writing is about abstract ideas, so it is hard to be concrete. But in psychology our natural subject matter is people and what they do. Putting people and their behavior at the center should make it be easy to be concrete. Yet students resist that temptation and shove them into the background. Compare these two sentences:

example->When irrefutable schema-inconsistent information is
integrated, it will normally elicit a process known as
causal attribution, which basically means that the
perceiver will try to generate a hypothesis which
explains the source of this inconsistent information.

revision->When people try to integrate irrefutable schema-
inconsistent information, they will normally use a
process known as causal attribution, which basically
means that they will try to generate a hypothesis that
explains the source of the inconsistent information.

All I have done is make the implicit subject--people--explicit. That made the process seem more concrete and, incidentally, forced me to use the active instead of the passive voice. Both of these consequences are desirable. The example, of course, could be improved in other ways too.

revision->Typically, people integrate irrefutable schema-inconsistent
information by using causal attribution to explain the source
of the inconsistency.

I think the sentence is still jargon-packed and pedantic, but at least it's clear, accurate, active, and terse.

12. Do not center your writing on previous researchers.

It is all too easy to name one scholar after another and describe what they claimed, as in these two examples:

Tversky and Kahneman (1983) review the literature in
which people making certain decisions under uncertainty
fail to take base-rates into account.

Markman (1987) points out that the way young children
succeed at acquiring the concepts that their language
encodes so quickly is that they are limited in the
kinds of hypotheses they consider.

Ordinarily you will want to focus on how people think and behave and not on what scholars have to say about this. You will undermine that purpose if you place the scholars in the subject position. In the examples just cited, the sentences are about Tversky and Kahneman, and about Markman, and they shouldn't be. Depending on your purpose, focus on the processes, behavior, findings, and what the findings mean. Put the scholars in secondary locations, subordinate clauses, or parentheses, as in these revisions:

People making certain decisions under uncertainty fail to take base-rates into account (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983).

How do children succeed at acquiring the concepts that their language encodes so quickly? According to Markman (1987), it is because they are limited in the kinds of hypotheses they consider.

In both revisions the focus is back where it belongs--on people and their psychological processes. Occasionally, of course, you may want to focus on the researchers themselves, but that should be rare.

13. Use quotations sparingly.

Quotations should not be used as evidence. Most of the time you will be writing about what was done and found. You should be able to state and cite a point, idea, or finding without relying on direct quotation. If your goal is to critique a certain point, then quoting might make sense, but be sure to quote wisely, precisely, and briefly.

14. Avoid nominalizations, especially the first time you mention an action.

A nominalization is a verb or adjective turned into a noun. They are deadening because they make concrete concepts abstract and because they tempt you into omitting the concrete people and objects that are acting.

15. Do not begin sentences with empty words (e.g., "it" or "this").

An example:

It is possible that subjects evaluate their answer's
correctness by the ease with which they can generate
reasons that support this answer.

Sentences like this are weak. They place what is important in a subordinate position. They are easy to revise, as in this example: "Subjects may evaluate their answer's correctness..."

Here are some common offenders:

Replace:---- With:

It is often the case that they:---- They often...
It may be true that they:---- They may...
It is obvious that:---- Obviously,...

16. In reporting your data, describe your findings, not your statistics.

One of the banes of good writing in psychology is statistical jargon. When you describe what you found in an experiment, you may be tempted to write like this (from a journal article):

The analysis of variance for the total number of items recalled on the House passage indicated only a significant effect of recall period, F (1,84) = 19.92, p < .001. All other F's were not significant.

Now what are we readers interested in? Surely not the analysis of variance per se. We want to know the pattern of results, and the author never tells us. Why didn't he say this:

Subjects who read the House passage recalled an average
of one item more after one day than after two days,
F (1,84) = 19.92, p < .001. There were no otherreliable differences.

He thinks about his data as entries in an analysis of variance table. But that isn't the way we think about them. Ordinarily, we want to know about your findings, not about your analysis of variance, so you should organize your writing around those findings. Although you may think of your findings as entries in an analysis of variance table, we don't. The idea is to organize your writing around your findings and to demote statistical talk to subordinate positions--subordinate clauses, parentheses, anywhere but prominent places. And get rid of as much jargon as you can.

17. A few miscellaneous points.

Revise your work. Set it aside for awhile. Revise it again. Let someone else read it. Revise it. Wait a few days and revise it again. You never should turn in a first or second draft of a paper. Never.

Loosely defined, "et al." means "and others" and it should be written as you see here. It's not "et. al" or "et. al.". The possessive form is "et al.'s". I really don't like to see the abbreviation used within a sentence. I'd prefer to see "and colleagues" or some comparable phrase. Parenthetically, psychologists use "et al." to indicate the source of an idea and it should appear like this:

(Smith et al., 1988)

The abbreviation should not be used for the first mention of a group of authors unless there are 6 or more authors.

Often, the abbreviations "e.g." and "i.e." are misused. They should appear as they do here and depending on the usage, they are followed by a comma (e.g., when creating a series, or when specifying a point, i.e., when clarifying a statement). Respectively, they mean "for example" and "that is."

The word "data" is still plural.

Anecdotes and personal impressions do not serve as evidence. Evidence refers to data.

Describing a phenomenon is not the same as explaining it.

Always write with your readers in mind. They may not share your perspective, and they certainly don't want to work harder than necessary. Your writing should be clear and straightforward.

When asked to use APA style, that means you should follow the guidelines. The proper format for APA references is:

         Buss, D. (1996). The evolutionary psychology of human social strategies. In E. T. Higgins & A. W.     Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 3-38). New York: Guilford Press.

        Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1987). From evolution to behavior: Evolutionary psychology as the missing link. In J. Dupre (Ed.), The latest on the best: Essays on evolution and optimality (pp. 276-306). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

        Ficarrotto, T. J. (1990). Racism, sexism, and erotophobia: Attitudes of heterosexuals toward homosexuals. Journal of Homosexuality, 19, 111-116.

        Gleick, E. (1997, April 7). Inside the web of death. Time, pp. 31-36.

        Greenwald, A. G., Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102, 4-27.

        Harrary, K. (1992, March/April). The truth about Jonestown: Thirteen years later-why we should still be afraid. Psychology Today, 62-72, 88.

        Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8, 162-166.

    Steele, C. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52, 613-629.

    Thayer, R. E., Newman, J. R., & McClain, T. M. (1994). Self-regulation of mood: Strategies for changing a bad mood, raising energy, and reducing tension. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 910-925.

----- end