Burns_TP#3

Prior to this session, I reviewed 10-12 pages of the work Dae is doing for a journal article.  The only area of difficulty was the Introduction section.  In this section Dae would shift from active to passive voice from one sentence to the next.  He used qualifying phrases that took the punch out of his message.  His literature review of the topic area was spread throughout the introduction.  This made the introduction choppy and you could see that he had struggled with revisions of this section.  That is the process that led to what appeared to be improper words.  They were, in fact, words left over from an earlier version.  Dae always makes more sense than what I was reading in the introduction.  So I stopped wrestling with the introduction and I moved on to the remainder of the pages he had given to me.

Dae wrote these pages in a confident and active voice.  When he referred to prior research, he identified the particular contributions that make it possible to apply social science techniques to determine the relative impact that each component has upon the psychological reaction of consumers.  That data is then used to predict consequent social behavior by the consumers.  He easily demonstrated how high level techniques would produced a more integrated understanding of the behavior of sports consumers around the world.  Key variables were discussed with clarity.

Dae will set the introduction aside until he is far enough along with the body of his work that the introduction comes from certain knowledge, rather than speculation.  I am confident that introduction will provide a more cogent literature review tied to his research.  I am confident that the voice will be active as he introduces the body of the journal article and how that work adds to the existing corpus of tested data and reliable conclusions and predictions.

We laughed and had a great discussion about the differences when writing an article for an academic journal.  Unlike research papers, journal articles do not allocate time and space to completely describe proposed hypotheses, methods to test the null hypotheses and all of the stuff that goes into graduate research papers.  Yet, that is how we are trained, so the first journal article we write creates discomfort when crafting the introduction.  We discussed how that discomfort affects our writing. The awkwardness we are feeling is transferred straight into our writing..  Once we are back in the wheel house of our training and experience, the words just flow.

At some point, the word flow for the introduction will make sense to Dae.  That is when he will write it.

So now we will continue to review any area where he feels less confident about expression of content.  He is a confident man and scholar, so anything that troubles him will not be an easy and simple fix.  It will make the tutor have to think, explore, discuss and learn.