Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy

MSc/PGDip/PGCert MSK physiotherapy: University of Brighton

6

The craft of writing: weaving a golden thread.

The challenging of writing for postgraduate studies can be met with an array of emotions; anticipation, apprehension and perhaps even paralysing anxiety. So how are you going to get started, what skills do you need to demonstrate, and how are you going to make your work a pleasure to read? And it doesn’t end there; receiving your feedback is the start of a new chapter on your journey to becoming a beautiful writer, so how are you going to make the most of it?

Photo of calligraphy by rawpixel.com

Getting started

Overcoming inertia can be hard particularly when other demands are competing with your studies. Postgraduate studies in particular, are often conducted alongside other commitments; work (often full-time), caring for children and parents, respecting and protecting time spent with significant others, housework and looking after your own health and wellbeing. So, it is important to find a time and place that works best for you and protect it where possible. Do you work best by getting up before the rest of the household or are you better working after the children are in bed? Is working in the library or staying longer in the office better for you, or is it outside that you do your best thinking? Once you’ve identified the place and time it’s time to get something down on paper.

  • Set yourself small challenges e.g. Monday: write 100 word on x; Tuesday: write 200 words on y: Wednesday write 400 words on z.
  • Start by writing about an aspect you are more comfortable with.
  • If you find it easier you might like to dictate your thoughts first (you can use convert your speech functions on many programmes and devices).

An object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force Thanks to themadlolscientist Flickr

Reading

When searching the literature, it is easy to get distracted by other articles that pique your interest but may not be directly related to your essay focus. If you can’t resist the temptation of downloading them, put them in a folder and come back to them once you have finished your essay.

  • Focus by asking yourself why am I reading this, and what is being claimed that is relevant to answering my question?
  • Start by reading the abstract to get an overview of the article. Highlight the study aim or research question.
  • Ask yourself if you need to read the introduction. If you know the area of research, you will already have a good idea of the contextual background.
  • Carefully read the methods, analysis methods and the results/findings. Don’t skip over tables and figures. Stop and dwell on the figures and consider how meaningful they are. The ‘Tiger that isn’t’ by Michael Blastland and Andre Dilnot is a great read. It may help to be more critical and thoughtful when interpreting numbers free to download
  • Make judgments about the strengths and weaknesses of the study and write down your interpretation of the results before being swayed by spin in the discussion link to article on spin in biomedical research.
  • When making notes, only extract the information that relates to your essay/ question. For example, if you are looking at the effects of treatment on pain, only extract the information on pain related measures in a study, not other measures they may have included like range of movement of disability scores.
  • Make notes in your own words to avoid unintentional plagiarism.

Books Austing Evan Flickr

Critical evaluation and synthesis

Critical evaluation

Becoming aware and sensitive to your own assumptions is important in developing criticality. Before you begin to read on a topic it may be a good idea to reflect on, and write down, your pre-assumptions and pre-understanding and consider how they might affect your interpretations and claims. Ask yourself whether you are less critical of research that confirms your own biases. In the later stages of writing, revisit your written reflections and ask yourself whether your pre-understanding and biases are evident in your essay.

  • Tell the reader why you mention a study
  • Include a summary of the study purpose
  • Explain why it is relevant to your essay question/ study
  • Provide a brief summary of what they did:
  • Tell your reader about the methodology, methods, analysis and results/findings.
  • Be judicious about what information you include.
  • Consider this in relation to your subsequent evaluation.
  • If you are mentioning aspects on internal validity, such as flaws in the study design, include information on the aspect of the design that you are critiquing.
  • If you are discussing external validity you will want to include in your description what it is that limits external validity e.g. ‘participants with other health complaints or on medication were excluded from the study and thus the study population does not represent a typical population of persons presenting with persistent pain’.
  • Try and find resources to help you better understand the specific statistics / analysis/ methodology that your essay draws on. Here are some examples:
    • Comparing between different interventions link
    • Evaluating systematic reviews link
    • Evaluating qualitative research link
    • Reliability and validity (are often confused, so make sure you understand the difference and use the terms correctly) link
    • Validity link
  • Be careful not to waste your valuable word count describing too much at the expense of evaluation.
  • Be constructive in your criticism. One common error is criticising a study for not doing something it never aimed to do. In academic writing your job is to use the evidence to support your argument, but it might not have been designed with your argument in mind. Consider the complexities of research- no study is perfect. When you are proof reading your work, imagine the author will read your essay, would they be offended by the way you have expressed your comments on the limitations of their work?
  • Where possible explain what could been done differently in future research.

I have complied some resources that you might find useful to help you develop your critical evaluation skills Padlet link The critical appraisal skills programme (CASP) includes links to checklists which may help you to develop your skills of assessing the internal validity of studies.

Picture of weighing scales

Synthesis

Once you have developed the skills of evaluating a single study, the next step is to draw evidence from multiple studies together. Writing a sequential review of one study followed by another is not ideal, instead try and look for patterns / contrasts or similarities across texts in order to group studies together. You might group according to factors such as study design (RCT/ cohort study/ case study); outcome measure (visual analogue scale (VAS) / Pressure pain threshold) or results (significant v non-significant).

Constructing a table that includes study details and highlight their similarities and difference can help with synthesis (and word count). Think carefully about the column headings and how they can best highlight the differences between studies (they might include titles such as: authors, study design, participants, durations of symptoms, groups / treatment conditions, dose parameters, outcome measures, results, follow-up periods). Remember to refer to the table and discuss your synthesis of these studies within the text.

Structuring your writing

The title

It may sound obvious to state that the title of your work should match the content. But it is a recurring error in student work. Make sure it includes the key words that indicate the focus of your essay.

The introduction

The introduction is an important part of your essay. It is providing the skeleton of you essay which you will flesh out later in the main body of the text. It has two main elements, starting with a contextual background which sets the scene funnelling down to a focussed background which rehearses the main points / arguments that will form the paragraphs in your essay. Your introduction should start to sew a golden thread that weaves through the entire essay.

Image of person half skeleton and half with muscles from Flickr

 

 

Imagine you are going on a road trip to an unfamiliar destination. Even with the luxury of Satellite Navigation and interactive maps, you might just like to look at your crusty old paper map before you leave in order to make a mental note of significant landmarks, places or junctions you should pass. Then, enroute you may experience a sense of reassuring familiarity, or perhaps nervous relief, as you pass these references. You are on the right road. Your job as a writer, is to provide those landmarks for your reader; to take them on a comfortable and familiar journey through your essay.

Photo of a map and the Jack Kerouac book ‘On the Road’ from Flickr

Your conclusion

Start your conclusion by reminding your reader of the aim of the work / research question. Next draw together the golden threads from the main arguments / points in your text (keep to the same order). Be cautious about claiming greater certainty than the evidence can support. Consider how broad any generalisations you make can be.

Writing paragraphs

Your writing should be structured in a way that leads your reader through the text. Remember your car journey and the map references? Your reader shouldn’t need to pause and wonder ‘why are they telling me this?’ or ‘so what?’. In the past I have often directed students to blogs including tips on how to structure writing (a bit like this or another writing blog link). During a meeting with a student who hadn’t yet demonstrated using these tips in his writing, I mentioned that my children (who were about 13, 14 and 15 at the time), had been taught at school to structure their work using PEEL (Point, Evidence, Evaluate, Link). His response was ‘well why didn’t you tell me that before?’

Although I think the structure is a great starting point, some of the key writing elements of postgraduate writing skills are not emphasised. My suggestion is PEEESI/RL (unfortunately not quite as memorable).

  • State the Point or the focus of paragraph
  • Explain how the point is related to your essay / study. Predict your reader asking themselves ‘why are they telling me this?’
  • Back the point up with Evidence
  • Evaluate the evidence
  • Synthesise the evidence, highlighting contradictory evidence and explaining where the strongest evidence lies (more on this later). You may want to make an interim conclusion related to this specific paragraph.
  • Explain the Implications or relevance of this evidence to the overall essay or often to clinical practice. This should answer your readers’ ‘so what?’ question.
  • Link to the next paragraph.

Crafting

Once you have the structure of your written work in place, now is the time to make it beautiful. For me it conjures up images of making a pot, after shaping the pot, it is decorated, polished, and glazed to make it more beautiful.

Image of pot on potters’ wheel by https://pixabay.com/users/marcelkessler-3217273/

Here are some crafting tips:

  • Don’t start a paragraph with a reference. Remember it should start by explaining the focus (point) of this paragraph.
  • Where possible keep reference in brackets at the end of sentences, so that they don’t interrupt the flow of the text.
  • The consequences of using overcomplicated language are nicely highlighted in this article Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly
  • It may be necessary to use discipline specific words that may be unfamiliar to readers, in which case include a definition as a footnote.

Dwelling on the feedback

The mark you receive is likely to seem like the most important thing to you and is probably the point of your initial focus. However, the mark is not going to help you improve. The qualitative feedback and feedforward comments are formative; intended to help you to form into a sophisticated writer. If you refer your written assessment you may experience a range of emotions, self-doubt, disappointment, frustration, anger, denial (the marker got this one wrong). During over years as an academic, I have seen persons experiencing all of these emotions. Referring a written assessment can provide a catalyst for personal and academic growth. My advice would be to leave space before reacting to the feedback, spend time reading and re-reading the feedback alongside your essay, reflecting on the feedback and asking yourself. How could I have done this differently, what can I learn from this comment and what does this mean in terms of what I do when I start to write again? It might then be worth arranging to meet the marker of your work, to discuss anything that you are unsure about and test out your interpretations of what you can do to improve. butterfly metamorphosis video

Photo of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

If you did well enough to pass your written assessment, this advice applies to you to, crafting your skills on smaller pieces of writing is preparing you for the summit of academic writing for your course, your dissertation. Hopefully this won’t be the end of your journey but the start of something else as highlighted by publications produced by students Publications by students on MSc Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy

Dr Clair Hebron, Principal lecturer. Course leader MSK physiotherapy.

Clair Hebron • May 5, 2020


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Comments

  1. teresa spurin May 6, 2020 - 9:02 pm Reply

    Brilliant blog, with so many resources packed in. Thank you

    • Clair Hebron May 6, 2020 - 9:05 pm Reply

      Thanks TJ 🙂 hope you find it useful.

  2. Katy Williams May 29, 2020 - 5:51 pm Reply

    Remember the golden thread nuggets!!! Great blog Clair. Thank you …..may come in useful for a PhD!!!

    • Clair Hebron June 1, 2020 - 8:29 am Reply

      Thanks Katy. Good to hear a PhD is on your radar 🙂

  3. Benjamin Evans April 27, 2022 - 9:56 am Reply

    Thanks for the info

  4. Camilla May 29, 2023 - 3:10 pm Reply

    “The craft of writing: weaving a golden thread” encapsulates the artistry and skill required to create captivating literature. Just as a skilled weaver intertwines delicate threads to form a magnificent tapestry, a writer crafts words, sentences, and ideas to create a captivating story. Each word serves as a thread that, when expertly woven together, forms a rich and immersive narrative. This parallels the essence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s renowned novel, “The Great Gatsby,” where he masterfully weaves a story of ambition, love, and disillusionment. Exploring the collection of insightful quotes on https://freebooksummary.com/category/the-great-gatsby-quotes allows readers to delve deeper into Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship and appreciate the intricate golden thread that binds his literary masterpiece.

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