Graduate Student Expectations

Reading
Undergraduate Student Expectations
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  • Read to "consume" knowledge: comprehend, memorize, absorb main ideas
  • Try to understand explicitly stated claims and arguments in readings
  • If the immediate usefulness of information presented within readings is not immediately understood, you might choose to gloss over them, passing your eyes over the words but not necessarily internalizing any of the meaning.
  • As you read, you might ask yourself: "What is the author trying to say? How does this support what I am leaning in the course?"
Graduate Student Expectations
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  • Read to critique and create knowledge
  • Try to understand where the author's ideas come from, how they might be challenged, how they might be related to other ideas from other readings, what factors such as politics affect the premise
  • If the immediate usefulness of information presented within readings is not immediately understood, you might closely examine the text to better comprehend where the ideas come from, how they might be challenged, how they might be related to other ideas from other readings, what factors such as politics affect the premise, and perhaps most importantly how taking the reading seriously influences and affects your personal understanding of the field being studied.
  • As you read, you might ask yourself: "How does taking the reading seriously influence and affect my personal understanding of the field being studied?"
Writing
Undergraduate Student Expectations
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  • Summarize the events in a story
  • Paraphrase the conclusions from basic research article
  • Write a personal response to a book or movie
  • Summarize what a teacher said in a straightforward lecture
​Graduate Student Expectations
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  • Frame an argument
  • Take someone else’s argument apart
  • Systematically inspect a document, issue, event
  • Synthesize different points of view
  • Apply a theory to disparate phenomena

​Characteristics of "Scholarly" Writing
​​Reading and writing are generally regarded as the principle components of graduate courses. Have you ever stopped to wonder about why this is the case? 

Unlike many undergraduate learning experiences, professors in graduate courses often assign readings that do not always produce clear, concise answers to specific questions. Such material is used to organize, unsettle, provoke, provide feedback, clarify, and possibly confuse particular issues. If this seems confusing at times, it may be the result of the transitional role graduate school is designed to play in your intellectual development. The expectations in graduate school extend beyond consuming and “absorbing” knowledge to producing original ideas that have value. Such transitional thinking reflects the creative nature of graduate educational experiences (Robinson, 2011), and illustrates an important difference between graduate and undergraduate purpose. Writing is key to creative expression in graduate school because it provides the medium for expressing thoughts, understandings, and original ideas in purposeful and precise ways.

As a graduate student, it is imperative that you practice the skill of scholarly writing in all coursework, which includes your discussion participations online as well as any documents or presentations you might produce. Essentially, every item you produce for your coursework must adhere to the principles of scholarly writing. 

But what characterizes scholarly writing? Although the exact nature of “scholarly” writing may be debated, there is some general agreement among the academic community that scholarly writing involves a formal tone and includes attribution and synthesis of sources into writing and the support of assertions made in our writing through use of literature. Furthermore, academic writing is for an audience of academics, other scholars, and therefore is quite different than the writing we may conduct in social media, texting, in writing a business or personal correspondence in email, and certainly much different in tone and format than what we would produce in texting or other more casual forms of writing.

Kemp (2007) explored the nature of scholarly writing in education and concluded that it is a skill to be practiced during coursework with the onus of learning these skills belonging mostly to the learner with some shared responsibility for coaching and feedback from instructors.  Some of the key findings from Kemp are listed below to guide you on what it means to write in a scholarly, or academic, way. You will find support for these points about scholarly writing from the well-known OWL at Purdue University (2019), and the APA Style Manual.
  • Avoid contractions.
  • Avoid passive language.
  • Use direct quotes sparingly.
  • Introduce and explain all acronyms.
  • Avoid biased and offensive language.
  • Avoid ending sentences in prepositions.
  • Avoid use of figurative language and clichés.
  • Avoid syntax, grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors.
  • Avoid using this, these, or those as the subject or start of a sentence.
  • Use, but do not over use, complex sentence structure (i.e., vary sentence length).
  • Attribute all sources for ideas and assertions (i.e., avoid plagiarism).
  • Write in the third person voice unless directed to write in the first person voice.
  • Create succinct paragraphs with clear topic sentences, supporting sentences and quotes or paraphrases and summaries from sources, and succinct conclusion and/or transition sentences.
References and Resources
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Questions?  Email Greg Sherman.