Psychology 361

Term Paper Assignment

In this assignment, you will do something that students, academics, public officials, and others are often called on to do: read a collection of research reports on a single subject and report on the information in them. This is a common and important kind of writing in which the writer tries to convey information in a straightforward, clear way for a reader looking for information.

You will read a small portion of a well focused body of academic research on gender differences in talk. In your essay, you will concentrate on the important'though deceptively simple'skill of reporting accurately what you learn from the research studies. You will avoid speculating about why gender differences occur in your essay, however. Similarly, you will avoid taking sides with either men or women or finding fault with one of the two sexes. Instead, you will report on what these researchers claim to have learned about men's and women's talk, writing your report for a reader who is interested in what researchers are saying. This form of straight reporting is different from argument, and it presents its own challenges.

When writers report on others' research, they are likely to have to complete the following tasks:
? classify the information
? organize the information by topics or themes
? define key terms and keep them in focus for the reader
? clarify information for a reader not already familiar with it
? summarize research findings
? use references accurately and purposefully
? attribute ideas to their authors

Task I. Your first task is to read the articles and summarize their findings on the research reports page. Make one research report page for each of the articles and turn them in with your paper.

Research Summary Form (You will need ony copy of the following form for each of the articles.)

Research Summary Form

Title of Reading

Types of People Studied (for example, age, ethnicity, class)

Types of Conversational Groupings (for examples, pairs or larger groups, sexes of partipants)

Key Topics/Terms/Concepts
 

Conclusions about Male Talk:
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusions about Female Talk:
 
 
 
 
 

Main Conclusions:

Task II: Write an outline. (This outline will appear as headings in the final version of your paper. Do not turn in a separate outline.)

Probably the most obvious ways to outline your paper are the following:
By sex'male talk vs. female talk
By types of talk'questions, directives, etc.
By attitudes toward conflict'cooperation, competition
These different kinds of classifying are all present in the readings and, in fact, serve to organize some of the reports. Goodwin, for instance, organizes her report by putting the boys' talk first and then the girls' talk, but she also makes use of classifications of types of talk or attitudes toward conflict as she discusses boys' and then girls' talk. So even writers who use some of the same classifications (such as types of talk) can nevertheless organize how they present these classifications in different ways.
Here we describe several possible ways to organize the material. Whatever organization you choose, you will have main topic headings and then subtopic headings under those main topics. Here's how the first plan might look in outline form:


Plan 1: Outline by Sex
Introduction
Boys' Talk
Aggravated forms
[etc.]

Girls' Talk
Mitigated forms
Questions
[etc.]


With Plan 1 , note that you begin by classifying the information into information about men's and information about women's talk. (For convenience we are referring to both young and adult males as 'men' and both young and adult females as 'women.') Then you further classify the information about each gender by constructing categories that you think cover the range of material in the reports you read and then listing those as subtopics under your main topic categories; we have listed several possible subtopic headings above, but you could name or sequence your subtopics differently. With Plan 1, you might have a different number of subtopic headings under each of the two main topics, depending on what you find in the reports. Note that in Plan 1, you disregard the difference in ages among the people studied; you simply put together all of the findings about males (children or adults) separately from all the findings about females (children or adults), and you can put either the males' or the females' talk first because which comes first may not matter.
A second plan focuses on ways of dealing with disagreement or conflict. Here is one way to classify by attitudes toward conflict:

Plan 2: Organizing by Attitudes Toward Conflict
Introduction
Collaborative or cooperative talk
Supportive minimal responses
Mitigated Directives
[etc.]
Competitive or adversarial talk
Making Statements
Aggravated directives
[etc.]
Conclusion

If you use Plan 2, you can choose from alternative, closely related terms already in these reports: one related set of terms used in the readings is collaborative, cooperative, supportive, or mitigated whereas another set is competitive, adversarial, hierarchical, or aggravated. Writers often use these terms in opposing pairs in order to describe ways of dealing with conflict: cooperative vs. competitive is a frequent pairing, as is supportive vs. adversarial. The pair mitigated vs. aggravated is useful for describing particular types of talk, as you have seen in some of these readings. Under each of the topic headings in Plan 2, you can explain how the different types of talk that Fishman, Goodwin, Sachs, and Sheldon discuss are used to promote cooperation or competition. Note that in this plan, as in Plan 1, you disregard the differences between children and adults when you organize your material.

You can also organize by types of talk, as in Plan 3. Your plan might look like this:


Plan 3: Organizing by Types of Talk
Introduction
Imperatives and Commands
Joint or Mitigated directives
Non-standard usages
Questions
[etc.]
Conclusion

In this case, you take some of the categories of talk that these reports discuss and look for ways of combining similar ones. You might, for instance, combine the directives that Goodwin discusses and the obliges that Sachs discusses and put both types of talk under the topic heading of 'Imperatives or commands.' There could easily be more than one set of terms for the categories in Plan 3 and more than one way to sequence them. Your choices will depend on which terms you choose, which information from the reports you decide belongs together, and what order you decide will best help a non-expert reader understand this new information.

Choose one of these three plans or create one of your own. You may
think of a way to organize the information that makes more sense to you and
would make the information accessible to your readers. Each of the three plans allows you to report information about possible gender differences in conversations, but the plans differ in how they arrange topics and subtopics. In all of the plans, a subtopic heading on your outline is likely to include discussion of more than one of the research reports, but there might be some subtopic headings in which you would refer to only one or two of the reports. All the plans will be more helpful to a reader than if you were to write an essay that presented the information in one report and then another and so on (Goodwin says this, Sachs says that, etc.).

Reporting the Information. The body of your paper will report the information itself. By now, you have chosen one of the three classification plans outlined above (or a different plan that you think will prove more effective). This plan allows you to arrange your report by topics (or topically), taking one topic heading at a time and reporting all the information relevant to that topic before you proceed to another one. You will not arrange your report simply by summarizing first one study and then the next, because that would require your reader to do too much of the work you need to do. A report is more useful for a reader if it makes specific connections by topic; with full discussion of one topic and then another, readers will be able to see topical connections instead of having to make connections for themselves. In the next section (Learning More About Strategies for Reporting Information), we offer more detailed suggestions about how to report information clearly and effectively within the topics and subtopics of your report.

YOUR PAPER SHOULD BE 4-5 PAGES LONG AND MUST BE DOUBLE-SPACED.


Task III. Write your paper. In setting up your paper, refer to the following scoring sheet which will be used to grade your paper.

Psychology 361 Scoring Sheet

Points Possible
The STRUCTURE of your paper:

? Intro: Establishing Significance 6
? Intro: Orienting/Forecasting Statement 6
? Outline (Appearing as Headings in Text) 6
? Paragraphs Conform to Headings 6
? Conclusion 6

The CONTENT of Your Paper
? Paragraphs Contain Topic Sentences 9
? Key Terms/Concepts Defined 9
? Multiple Authors Cited/Quoted per concept 15
? Smooth transitions among the multiple authors 12
? Supporting Details 6
? Subjects' Age, Sex, Race, Social Class 3
? Study Subjects Quoted 6

Research Summaries 10

Total Structure and Content Points (100 Possible): __________

Less points for incorrect grammar, spelling, etc.: -___________

Other: _______________________________ +/-__________

_______________________________ +/-__________

Explanation of Scoring:

Introduction: Establishing Significance:The opening should take a reader who may know nothing about the subject'and may never before have been curious about it'and prompt that reader to want to read further and understand enough to proceed. A successful opening draws your readers in and prepares them to understand the new information you will present.
An engaging opening. Your imagined reader is someone who has a lively interest in human behavior and likes to read for information and enjoyment. Picture this reader as cruising through a magazine looking for something interesting'and significant'to read about. There are several ways
to draw this reader in:
? Relate a personal observation of men and women not understanding each other or speaking at cross purposes.
? Quote one passage of typical male and female speech from the research.
? Appeal directly to readers' interests in communicating better with
? everyone.
? Present two or three significant findings from the research.
? Relate a personal experience in which you have had to use different strategies in talking to men rather than women or vice versa.

Brief information about the context of the research. Offer your readers whatever contextual information you think they will need about when or how these reports were written and what sort of research they grew out of. Since you yourself began this chapter not knowing about this research, you should be able easily to imagine what sort of initial information another reader needs in order to make sense of the information that will follow. You need not say much about these four writers, but your report will look more authoritative if you offer some of the information about them that you will find in our headnotes.
It is conventional to refer to authors by their last name only; e.g., Fishman found that ...

Introduction: Orienting/Forecasting Statement. The forecasting statement tells your reader how and in what order you will present the information. It offers the reader a way to follow your report more easily and anticipate what is coming. For this report, you will not need the same kind of thesis statement you would need for an argument because you are not offering a thesis of your own. You still need to orient the reader to what is coming, however, and so you need a statement telling what you are going to report on. This statement should explain that you will report on a particular body of research on gender differences in language.

The most likely place for your forecast is at the end of the opening. You can give your reader a clear sense of your plan with a sentence like one of the following:
[1] Current research on talk suggests that men and women differ in x, y, and z.
[2] Research on gender differences in conversation suggests four
differences between women's and men's talk: a,b,c,d.
[3] According to researchers who study conversations, men and women
may differ in a, b, and c.
These are skeleton sentences only and are not meant to suggest that you find three items to fill the blanks in sentence [1] or four items to fill the blanks in sentence [2]. The sentence you construct should reflect the plan you have chosen and the key topics in your plan. Your most important key terms (e.g., 'cooperation,' 'mitigated,' 'directives') should appear in your forecasting statement.

Outline. The outline that you choose should appear in the text as headings of the different sections.

Paragraphs Conform to Outline. Your paragraphs should make sense in the context of the outline. For example, if you have a heading labeled 'aggravated directives', all of the material in that section to be related to that topic.

Conclusion. Closing gracefully and effectively requires important choices. You have a number of options:
Summarize key findings that you have reported on.
? Frame your report by referring to the personal experience that began
? your essay.
? Use a particularly telling quote from one of the writers in this chapter to
? summarize the significance of the research.
? Mention, briefly, the possible limitations in the research you have reported on and assert the importance of our learning more about differences in the ways people talk with each other.
? Speculate briefly about how understanding these differences in talk may help people avoid misunderstanding and improve their conversational interaction.

Research Summaries: Good research summaries are sufficiently detailed so that they distill information from the papers.

Paragraphs Contain Topic Sentences. Paragraphs should begin with a good topic sentence.

Key Terms/Concepts Defined. Key terms provide a powerful tool for writing an explanation or report. Naming key concepts (like 'cooperation' and 'competition') or key ways of talking (like 'directives' or 'questions') provides ways of communicating otherwise difficult material. Key terms bring order out of disorder and give a reader clear signposts for understanding a complex body of information.

In this kind of research on gender and conversation, we repeatedly find statements like the following, all of which hinge on key terms:

This is an example of positive politeness.
Boys use aggravated directives while girls use mitigated directives.
The term "obliges" covers ...
I term this dispute style single-voice discourse

Each of the key terms (italicized) in these sentences will catch and direct the reader's attention. But choosing which key terms to use requires careful consideration. Most of the key terms you choose will come from your readings, but as you have seen, terms may change from one writer to another. Fishman's use of 'work' is not picked up by later writers, even though they use her research and find it consistent with theirs. Goodwin's term 'directives' has points of contact with Sachs' term 'obliges,' even though the terms differ. On occasion, then, you will need either to choose between different possible terms or explain why you feel justified in considering Goodwin's 'directives,' for instance, to belong to the same category as Sachs' 'obliges.' Choosing key terms is part of the crucial conceptual work needed to make your essay successful.

Multiple Authors Cited/Quoted per concept. An important aspect of this assignment is integrating information from various sources into a coherent essay. As noted earlier, you can not arrange your report simply by summarizing first one study and then the next, because that would require your reader to do too much of the work you need to do. This is worth a lot of points. These writers are discussing very similar topics. There is a great deal of overlap among the papers. Therefore, you should be able to do some integration. Here's an example.

Women also seem more likely than men to use attention beginnings to initiate a conversation, to catch a person's attention during a conversation, and to promote a response. [Note the good topic sentence.] Attention beginnings are also used to emphasize the importance of a statement because they force a listener to pay close attention to the statement being said. In Fishman's study (1983), the phrase This is interesting was used as an attention beginning. In Marjorie Harness Goodwin's study (1980), the girls used something very like attention beginnings:

Pam: We gotta do em on the ground.
Pam: We gotta find some more bottles.
Pam: We gotta wash these off (p. 167)
Their use of the phrase We gotta gave Pam's statement a sense of importance that forced her listeners to pay close attention.

The writer has done several things here to help the reader. She defines Fishman's term attention beginnings, gives a brief example, and then makes the connection to Goodwin. Next, she uses a helpful illustration from Goodwin and then explains in her own words how Pam's use of We gotta can be considered an attention beginning. Note that even though Goodwin did not use the same term (attention beginnings) as Fishman, the writer has examined Goodwin's evidence closely enough to be able to apply Fishman's concepts to Goodwin's evidence. By making connections for the reader, the writer serves her reader well. These connections'between writers and between concepts'and the explanations that go with them make new information easier to understand and appreciate. Though each of researchers in this chapter tends to use different terms, there are nevertheless ways of connecting their research. Readers will rely on you to make connections among the terms and the ideas behind them, and the three plans we have described above all offer ways of doing so.

Supporting Details: Good papers provide plenty of detail -- examples that elaborate and enrich the paper.

Subjects' Age, Sex, Race, Social Class: This information is often important for comparing research

Study Subjects Quoted: Even though you will not ordinarily need to use direct quotations from the writers' explanations of their research, you should quote passages of talk from the research in order to illustrate differences in men's and women's talk. You have seen extended examples of talk quoted in the reports by Goodwin, Sachs, and Sheldon especially. Assume, then, that you will, for the most part, do as these researchers do. You will explain research findings in your own words, using parenthetical citations (names of researchers or dates of their research in parentheses'see Appendix 2) for references. But you will use quotations from the talk these researchers studied in order to illustrate how people talk or what you mean by an aggravated directive or some other type of talk.

To illustrate different ways of talking, for instance, you might write something like this using brief examples of what Goodwin means by directives:

Goodwin distinguishes between the aggravated directives the boys use -- 'Gimme the pliers!' or 'Man don't come down in here where I am' -- and the mitigated directives the girls use -- 'Let's go around Subs and Suds,'

Or you might illustrate what Goodwin means by 'directives' by quoting an extended example of speech as Goodwin does with Michael and Poochie, for
instance, in her third paragraph.

Here is how one writer effectively uses the Michael and Poochie example to
support her explanation that men use talk for domination:

Males may be more likely than women to use talk to dominate
others. Goodwin (1980) uses the following example:
Michael: Gimme the pliers!
Poochie: (gives pliers to Michael)
Michael: All right. Gimme some rubber bands,
Chopper: (giving rubber bands to Michael)
Michael: All rights. Give me your hangers Tokay.
Tokay: (gives hangers to Michael) (p. 158)

This example shows an extreme situation of a male assuming a leadership role and dominating the speaking. Note that Poochie, Chopper, and Tokay did not utter any remarks. Michael continuously gave orders, which were immediately followed. The example supports the writer's point, but she does not assume that the example speaks for itself. Instead, she follows the example with a helpful explanation of how specific parts of this exchange'Poochie's, Chopper's, and Tokay's silence'illustrate the point she has made.

Referring to Your Sources. Since this is a report about research, you will need to refer constantly to the research itself'and the researchers. In a report on research, any ideas that come from a particular researcher'including facts, theories, and interpretations, as well as direct quotations'need to be attributed to that researcher. Referring accurately to sources involves more than merely inserting page references every time you quote a source. Ideas, findings, interpretations, and summaries that you take from the research also require clear references to their sources.
Here is a sample passage referring to Fishman:

The resource Fishman (1983) calls attention beginnings is also primarily used by women as a way to initiate a conversation. An attention beginning is a phrase such as 'this is interesting' or 'guess what,' that encourages another person to respond to the speaker.

Note that the writer uses Fishman's term (attention beginnings), and gives two brief examples from the talk Fishman studied. These are all essential ingredients in a report on research. However, the writer quotes only an example from Fishman ('this is interesting') and makes up a second example without quoting passages of Fishman's own explanation. Most social science researchers do not often quote directly from the other researchers they cite because what is important is not the words that other researchers use to explain themselves, but a summary of their findings, their key terms, and important examples from their data.

Citing Sources
Since this chapter's readings are central to your essay, you will be referring to them constantly as you report on their information. And when you refer to sources, you must cite them, that is, identify the source. There are two basic types of references used in the body of the paper:
Fishman (1983) notes that girls use more mitigated directives than boys.
Several studies have found that girls use more mitigated directives than boys (Fishman, 1983; Sachs, 1987; Sheldon, 1992).
Note that in the first of these, the author is a regular part of the sentence, while in the second, the author is part of the parenthesis. Note also that in the second example the period ending the sentence goes after the parenthesis and there is no period after the word 'boys'.

If you are quoting something, also provide the page number; e.g., (Fishman, 1983, p. 97). Don't use the first names of authors, and don't use the titles of their papers.

The papers in your packet come from the following reference list. In any given semester, not all of the references may be used.

Eisikovits, E. (1998). Girl-talk/boy-talk: Sex differences in adolescent speech. In Language and Gender: A Reader, pp. 42-54. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Goodwin, M. H. (1998). Cooperation and competition across girls' play activities. In Language and Gender: A Reader, pp. 121-145. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Goodwin, M. H., & Goodwin, C. (1987). Children's arguing. In S. U. Philips, S. Steele, & C. Tanz (Eds.) Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative Perspective, pp. 189-248. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sacks, J. (1987). Preschool boys' and girls' language use in pretend play. In S. U. Philips, S. Steele, & C. Tanz (Eds.) Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative Perspective, pp. 178-188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sheldon, A. (1992). Preschool girls' discourse competence: Managing conflict. Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference, April 4 and 5, 1992. Edited by Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz, and Birch Moonwomon. Volume 2. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, 1992, pp. 528-529.