Issue link: http://ncumarketing.uberflip.com/i/1305547
7 Shared expectations. Students inherently understand that the work of social and behavioral scientists matters. Teaching students how to actually do work that matters in social and behavioral science is often related to shared expectations. Students may expect to simply add academic skills to their existing skill sets when often the opposite may be true. Helping students to prune away what is no longer useful and replace it with something better is often an educator's challenge. One of my favorite pruning tools is the academic phrasebank. Stock phrases. An academic phrasebank is a collection of stock phrases that students can use to help them participate more fully in academic conversations through their writing. Students become better scholarly writers when they are taught how to actively engage in important academic conversations on the written page. The tools we use to "prune our prose" as professors and authors may seem intimidating to students at first, but with practice these tools can become intrinsic to their writing approach. Phrases like, "Though I concede that ______, I still insist that _____." or "What XXX is saying here is that ____," do not have to be mysterious, as if part of the hidden language for some secret society. Students can be taught how to distinguish between what others say and what the student says in a way that is academically appropriate. I recently had a student ask me the "how do I get there from here?" question. She wanted to be a better writer but was not certain what path to take to get there. The student was essentially asking about scholarly voice. What is this mysterious "scholarly voice" and how does one develop it quickly? What the student may have overlooked is the claim that scholarly work has on the mind. Academic conversations. To write better, often the way we think has to change. Students may not be aware that scholarly articles are essentially markers of scientific thought. Study articles can be interpreted as ongoing "conversations" within the scholarly community. These conversations are like territories that scholars claim, cultivate, or cede. Students must learn the scholarly territory and they also need to be taught how to claim, cultivate, and cede (i.e., enter these conversations) territory. Graff and Birkenstein (2018) observed that students generate good arguments and counterarguments not from an "isolation booth" but by reading, listening closely to other scholars, and looking for openings so they too can enter the conversation. The work we do can be hard. I also think it is noble. It matters. Edgar A. Guest, an American poet wrote, "You don't begrudge the labor when the roses start to bloom." I think he's right — because what we do matters. References Graff, G. & Birkenstein, C. (2018). They say/I say: The moves that matter in academic writing (4th ed.). W.W. Norton & Company. Guest, E. A. (2015). A Heap o' Livin'. Astounding stories.