Here are some thoughts about your term papers. Mixed in with my thoughts is text that I’ve grabbed from various sources around the web.
General Tips
- Try to write something interesting. Imagine that your audience will voluntarily choose to pick up and read your essay (as opposed to having to be paid to read it). Or even imagine that your audience actually pays money to read your essay — e.g. if it was published in Scientific American or The Atlantic.
- Be creative by thinking up new ideas or new angles to address a question. This skill is the most challenging part of writing, but it’s also key to earning high marks. Don’t neglect investing in deep thought about your question; don’t think you can just sit down and start writing without first thinking through and organizing your ideas.
- Finding something creative to say about what is already known is challenging. Consequently, some of you may find it easier to answer a novel question by analyzing data de novo rather than coming up with an interesting angle on what is already known. The bigsnp database is available to you and now has over 17,000 human genomes. I’m happy to add more data as needed; and I’m happy to help design complicated queries should you be having trouble with that.
- Expository writing means presenting ideas backed by evidence in a convincing way. Don’t force your reader to scour your text, hunting for what your main claims really are — these should be clearly communicated and convincingly supported.
- Topics are wide-open, but best to make sure that a substantial aspect of your thesis deals with using DNA and/or ancient DNA to infer insights into human history.
Approximate Grading Criteria:
Papers will be graded out of 50 points using this rubric.
- Mechanics (~10%)
- Effectiveness / validity / accuracy of arguments and evidence (~30%)
- Clarity and grace in your writing style (~30%)
- The substance of thought, both critical and creative (~30%)
1. Expository Essay:
The purpose of the assignment to have you engage with the primary literature and gain practice thinking critically and creatively. I suggest you start by close reading of a pair of papers on an interesting topic, then turn your attention to other related papers and expand from there as you start to focus in on a set of ideas. Learn to use Google Scholar (and other tools available through the library) to identify the relevant literature. Decide on a thesis, which may or may not be similar to what you’ve already presented in class. Based on your set of focus papers, communicate their findings, and synthesize, evaluate, and criticize their arguments in support of your thesis. Don’t feel you should model your prose on the jargon-rich style of primary literature papers — you can do just as well adopting a writing style pitched to educated adults (e.g. other Yale-NUS students) the with goal of effectively communicating interesting, incisive ideas backed by cited evidence. Essay length is highly variable, but will likely end up being in the range of 7-12 pages, double-spaced (not including the references section), and consist of the following components:
- An informative, specific, and engaging title.
- An abstract, following the style of other scientific papers
- A general introduction (1-2 pages)
- A critical evaluation of the issues presented, best arranged under subheadings that order ideas by logical relationship (5-8 pages).
- A clear and concise conclusion (1-2 pages)
- A reference section
Tips:
- Use a clear, crisp, writing style.
- Use figures when they help explain ideas that are otherwise challenging to communicate.
- Don’t feel constrained to use a passive voice in the third person, as is often done in scientific writing. An active voice is usually more engaging.
- Don’t use “this” without saying what “this” is referring to — i.e. write “This result favors a different hypothesis” not “This favors a different hypothesis.”
- Ideas are the currency and reward of scholarship, and in the context of a your paper, expressing someone else’s ideas without giving credit is considered theft. All ideas that are not original to you must be cited, except if they are so broadly understood that citation is not warranted. When in doubt, err on the side of citing. Any idea you express that is not original to you, but is not accompanied by a citation, will be considered plagiarism.
- Citations in the text should follow the “author, year” format: (Smith and Crick, 1992; Robinson, 1983; Obama et al., 1987).
- Citations in the references section should use the following format:
Smith, R. and F. Crick. 1992. Alliances among chipmunks serve to enhance foraging behaviors. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 61(2): 831-842.
2. Research Proposal
Use the same tips as in the essay format above. Please include:
An Abstract:
Concise summary of your proposal in brief.
An Introduction:
The introduction should convince your reader that what you propose is important and interesting. It should start from the general and move to the particular, and it should make explicit connections to ideas and results widely recognized as important. It should convince me that you have become a mini-expert on a narrow topic by having read a key set of recent papers. It should highlight what is still “missing” or “unknown” or “unresolved” with respect to the existing literature. At the end of your introduction, clearly frame your proposal as a list of questions or hypotheses. Feel free to include figures, particularly original ones that have strong explanatory power.
Two parts — Specific Aims and Research Plan:
The specific aims is more of a bulleted list of key goals of your research.
The research plan section is to demonstrate that the aims can be done. Here you must rely on the papers you have read. This step has both a logical and a practical part. The logic must be clear and convincing. The methods proposed must be doable and must have a clear, demonstrable relationship to the logic. Keep in mind that research proposals will be evaluated by a committee where people will ask:
- Do their proposed experiments clearly address their hypotheses?
- What is a clever alternative explanation that they have not thought of and for which they have not planned a control? i.e. even if their experiment “succeeds,” might their findings still be open to alternative hypotheses?
A good way to protect yourself from criticism is to anticipate all possible outcomes: “If my experiment resulted in x, does this really exclusively support my hypothesis, or could there be an alternative explanation?” Also: “If my experiment failed, and instead resulted in y, what does this mean with respect to my hypothesis?”
Your experiments should be designed to provide convincing answers to such questions. Thus it may be appropriate to have both a section on logical derivation that makes clear why you chose to test these particular hypotheses, and a section on experimental methods that shows how you are going to test them. If you can, describe explicitly the statistical tests you will use and the sample sizes that you will have. Describe your methods clearly and in enough detail so that someone else could repeat your experiment in a manner you would accept as fully comparable even if they obtained different results.
Discussion / Conclusion / Significance Section:
Include at the end of the proposal a section in which you discuss how you will interpret the results and what you will do next if they do not support your hypothesis.
References
A reference section as in the above format.
3. Original Research Paper
Use the same tips as above. Include:
Title and Abstract:
These days, 90% of the time academics only read the title and abstract, so these are the most critical parts of your paper — every word has to be perfect. An abstract should be clear and concise, including: (a) the general question that you will answer — i.e. what motivated you and what was not already known or otherwise needed to be answered, (b) any specific hypotheses that you have tested, (c) your findings, (d) your broader conclusions and what still remains to be answered.
An Introduction:
Introduce the reader to the history of the problem or question, what others have done on this topic, and what remains to be answered by you.
Methods
Here you can explain what methods you used to answer your question(s), but don’t neglect to fully cite your methods (unless you invented them here, which seems unlikely). Prefix each set of methods by briefly stating why you will use this method. It’s okay to move this entire methods section to an appendix, if you think it’s more efficient for the reader to go straight to the results/discussion.
Results plus Discussion / Conclusion / Significance:
Be sure to include the most important tables and figures here — less important tables can go in an appendix. I would prefer to see the figures in the text rather than having to flip to the end of the paper. With each figure, include a figure number, title, and legend, just as it is in the published papers we’ve been reading.
References
A reference section as in the above format.
Appendix
To avoid distracting your reader, feel free to move less important tables, methods, and figures as “supplementary” information in an appendix.