Writing up Quantitative Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Today’s book is less of a review than one can help you write research especially when you’re taking some college course. It does not reside on my shelf but in a book purgatory in my basement. It is not worthy enough like my Turabian book that sits on my shelf. Instead, this book is with hundreds and hundreds of others sitting in bins begging to be used or read. The book on the supreme court is calling me as I can see it but it resides in a bin underneath which deters me from grabbing it.

This book introduces humour while teaching you how to communicate which makes it a great book for college students learning how to communicate through their “research” or paper pretending to be so. What is this book like?

The book is broken into three sections with chapters within discussing the section topic. Opening a random page I come to Chapter 3which is the last chapter in the first section and I see, “Myth: Good Writers Do Not Share their Writing with Others.” This discusses feedback and why a good writer would seek feedback while others avoid it because they are smart or threatens their self-concept. For me, I hated seeking feedback because I thought I was horrible at writing and my position was weak. Graduate school forced me to seek feedback. The feedback I received showed me that I could write and my position was strong, though I needed to re-align and plumb my foundational argument. In other words, I needed to provide more clarity or remove certain writing habits. Incidentally, the best feedback I ever had was from a professor that in the kindest way said my final paper for the course was unacceptable and just bad. That hit hard, and I thought I had failed, but ended up writing an entirely new 40 or 50 page paper in less than 48 hours. The toughest professor became my favorite, and I sought her out when I was taking other classes. Classmates oftentimes provided tidbits of feedback that helped me while most didn’t understand their peer reviewing. The worst I had was a professor who had considered me to be very right wing leaning and ended up insulting everything I did. This jackass made the class miserable for me, but I still got the A and I had learned to set up my arguments and prove them. His reason for disliking me? He thought I focused on the battles of the American Civil War too much. I wasn’t the only person he was a jerk to. Military or former military people were aggressively attacked. This man’s arrogance was the reason I got the A as once I figured him out I could counter him each step of the way. I would not back down.

The author’s humour comes into play, too, as I randomly opened to Chapter 7 and read the section “Your Data Partially Support Your Predictions.” The first line goes, “Like a teen breaking curfew, you have a lot of explaining to do.” When the author inserts these moments of humour it can keep the student involved and not have to deal with a dry book relaying information.

The book does well in relaying information and instructing. The humour within the book is what makes the book rather enjoyable to read. It is an excellent requirement for college classes needing to teach students about writing quantitative research. I guess it doesn’t hurt for anyone else than needs a refresher.

I will reference the book from time to time when I am doing some work that requires care in writing unlike these blog posts where I just write in one take. When writing research or something similar I’ve done many versions before the final one and even then I am never happy with what I wrote. Unlike the author, most of what I write cannot include humour as it doesn’t fit, but I do agree with her statement, “Humor, more than any other rhetorical device, requires bravery.”