Is it all a question of the speed of change? In which case, the Industrial Revolution was more an evolution than a revolution, spread as it was over seventy to a hundred years. Or is it more to do with the scale of change? If this is the case, then theres little doubt that it was a revolution, what with the mechanisation of labour, factory production, the growth of cities and the development of mechanized transport.
Much the same could be argued for a concept like crisis. Again it appears to be inoffensive and untroubling; that is until you ask yourself, what do we really mean by the word? It comes from the Greek, Krisis, meaning a decisive moment or turning point. So are we really justified in arguing that the years 1634 were not only a time of serious challenge to Protestantism, but also a decisive turning point in its history? Whatever your answer, you now have a structure emerging: on the one hand you can argue that it was a time of serious challenge to Protestantism, but on the other you might question whether it really was a genuine turning point in its history.
The same analysis of concepts and arguments can be found in just about every subject. In politics there are concepts like freedom, ideology, equality, authority, power, political obligation, influence, legitimacy, democracy and many more. Do we really harbour not a single fear of ambiguity when we use such a large and important concept like freedom, or was Donovan Leitch right when he admitted in the sixties that, Freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking? What do we mean by legitimacy and how does it differ from legality? And when we use the word democracy do we mean direct or indirect democracy, representative or responsible, totalitarian or liberal, third world or communist?
In literature what do we mean by concepts like tragedy, comedy, irony, and satire? Indeed, its not unusual to find universities devoting complete courses to unravelling the implications of these and others like them: concepts like class, political obligation, punishment, revolution, authority and so on. In the following course outline, the concepts of punishment and obligation, and the distinction between law and morality, are central concerns that run throughout the course.
Entitled Moral Reasoning Reasoning In and About the Law, it is part of the programme at the University of Harvard: How is law related to morality? How is it distinct? Do we have an obligation to obey the law? What, if anything, justifies the imposition of legal punishment? These issues, and related issues dealing with the analysis and justification of legal practices, will be examined using the writings of philosophers, judges, and legal theorists.
Take just about any course at any university and you will see the same: that many of the challenges we face are questions about concepts. For example, the Philosophy Department of the University of Southampton describes its Philosophy of Science course in the following terms:
This course examines concepts of evidence, justification, probability and truth, in relation to scientific explanation, causality, laws of nature, theory and fact; the distinctions between science and pseudo-science, as well as between science and metaphor, are among the topics explored. Examples illustrating the philosophical argument will be drawn from the histories of the physical, biological and social sciences.
Syllabuses like these indicate the importance of key concepts both in the courses youre studying, and in the essays youre expected to write. By analysing them you not only give your essay a relevant structure, but, equally important, you qualify for the highest marks on offer. If, at this stage, you dont acknowledge the significance of these concepts by analysing their implications, you will almost certainly fail to analyse them in your essay. This will indicate not only that you havent seen the point of the question, but, more seriously, that you havent yet developed that thoughtful, reflective ability to question some of the most important assumptions we make when we use language. It is as if youre saying to the examiner that you can see no reason why these concepts should raise any particular problem and, therefore, they deserve no special treatment.
2. Choose one topic from each of three groups. Narrow each of the three down to a research topic. Then think of three-five titles of paragraphs in the research paper. Compare with your partner.
3. Underline the key concept in the following questions for research.
1. Discuss the management of health needs within a population group in the Primary Care setting.
(Nursing and Applied Clinical Studies, Canterbury Christ Church University).
2. What is bribery and can it be justified as an acceptable business practice?
(Business and Administration, University of Newcastle, Australia).
3. How do culture, race and ethnicity intersect in social work practice in multicultural society?
(Social Work, University of British Columbia, Canada).
4. Geomorphology is a branch of geology rather than of geography. Discuss.
(Geography, University of Oxford).
5. Mill has made as naïve and artless a use of naturalistic fallacy as nobody could desire. Good, he tells us, desirable, and you can find out what is desirable by seeking to find out what is actually desired The fact is that desirable does not mean able to be desired as visible means able to be seen. G. E. Moore. Discuss.
(Philosophy, University of Kent).
6. In the light of a number of recent high profile complaints about invasion of privacy, critically assess whether the press should continue to be self-regulating.
(Journalism, University of Newcastle, Australia).
7. What are the assumptions of the revealed preference approach to life valuation?
(Biology, Stanford University).
8. Free Trade leads to a Paretian Optimum. Free Trade leads to unacceptable inequalities. Discuss.
(Economics, University of Oxford).
Pre-Writing: Brainstorming, Pattern Notes, Mapping
Brainstorming is a way of gathering ideas about a topic. Think of a storm: thousand of drops of rain, all coming down together. Now, imagine thousands of ideas raining down onto your paper! When you brainstorm, write down every idea that comes to you. Dont worry now about whether the ideas are good or silly, useful or not. You can decide that later. Right now, it is important to gather as many ideas as possible.
It is important to stake your claim as early as possible, indeed as soon as you get the question. This involves two things: first, as weve seen, thinking through your analysis of the concepts and implications of the question, and second, writing down your own ideas on the question. Its now time to turn to the second of these: brainstorming your own ideas. This means that you empty your mind on the subject, without the aid of books. As quickly as possible you track the flow of your ideas as you note what you know about the subject and what you think might be relevant to the question.
Brainstorming is just a part of the process of analysis. After all, they both involve your own ideas, which you get down on paper as quickly as you can without the aid of books. But they are, in fact, quite different, and if you allow yourself to merge the two, skimping on one, you will almost certainly have problems. In analysis youre unwrapping whats already there. It may be buried deep, but by a process of introspection, through which you examine the different ways you use a concept such as authority or advertisement, you come to see more clearly the contours of the concept, its essential characteristics.
Brainstorming is just a part of the process of analysis. After all, they both involve your own ideas, which you get down on paper as quickly as you can without the aid of books. But they are, in fact, quite different, and if you allow yourself to merge the two, skimping on one, you will almost certainly have problems. In analysis youre unwrapping whats already there. It may be buried deep, but by a process of introspection, through which you examine the different ways you use a concept such as authority or advertisement, you come to see more clearly the contours of the concept, its essential characteristics.
In contrast, with brainstorming you are going beyond the concept: this is synthesis, rather than analysis. You are pulling together ideas, arguments and evidence that you think may have a bearing on the questions implications that you have already revealed through your analysis. So, whereas analysis is a convergent activity, brainstorming is divergent, synthesising material from different sources. If you like, one activity is centripetal, the other centrifugal. Confuse the two and youll do neither well.
If you overlook this distinction and merge the two activities, youre likely to struggle with two problems. First, if you abandon analysis too soon and embark on brainstorming, your focus will shift away from the implications of the question and the concepts it contains. Consequently, youre likely to find that you dont have the guidelines to direct your brainstorming into profitable areas. You will find a lot less material and much of what you do unearth you will no doubt discover later that you cannot use, because its irrelevant. On the other hand, if you analyse without brainstorming youll fail to arm yourself with your ideas and what you know about the topic. As a result, almost certainly two things will happen:
1. The authors you read for your research will dictate to you without your own ideas to protect you, it will be difficult, at times impossible, for you to resist the pull of their ideas and the persuasiveness of their arguments. As a result youll find yourself accepting the case they develop and the judgements they make without evaluating them sufficiently, even copying large sections of the text into your own notes.
2. And, equally serious, you will find it difficult to avoid including a great mass of material that is quite irrelevant to your purposes. All of this material may have been relevant to the authors purposes when he or she wrote the book, but their purposes are rarely identical with yours. Nevertheless, having spent days amassing this large quantity of notes, its most unlikely that youre going to find the detachment somewhere to decide that most of these notes are irrelevant to your essay and youve got to ditch them. Youre more likely to convince yourself that they can be made relevant, and you end up including them in a long, discursive, shapeless essay, in which the examiner frequently feels lost in a mass of irrelevant material.
So, brainstorming should be seen as distinct from analysis. It needs to be done straight after youve completed your analysis, which in turn needs to be done as soon as you have decided upon the question youre going to tackle. This will give your subconscious time to go away and riffle through your data banks for what it needs before you begin to set about your research.
If you dont make clear your own ideas and your interpretation of the implications of the question, your thinking is likely to be hijacked by the author and his or her intentions. If you dont ask your author clear questions you are not likely to get the clear, relevant answers you want.
Now that youve analysed the implications, use this to empty your mind on the question. Most of us are all too eager to convince ourselves that we know nothing about a subject and, therefore, we have no choice but to skip this stage and go straight into the books. But no matter what the subject, I have never found a group of students, despite all their declarations of ignorance and all their howls of protest, who were not able to put together a useful structure of ideas that would help them to decide as they read whats relevant to the essay and whats not. Once we tap into our own knowledge and experience, we can all come up with ideas and a standard by which to judge the authors point of view, which will liberate us from being poor helpless victims of what we read. We all have ideas and experience that allow us to negotiate with texts, evaluating the authors opinions, while we select what we want to use and discard the rest. Throughout this stage, although youre constantly checking your ideas for relevance, dont worry if your mind flows to unexpected areas and topics as the ideas come tumbling out. The important point is to get the ideas onto the page and to let the minds natural creativity and self-organisation run its course, until youve emptied your mind. Later you can edit the ideas, discarding those that are not strictly relevant to the question.
One of the most effective methods for the brainstorming stage is the method known as pattern notes. Rather than starting at the top of the page and working down in a linear form in sentences or lists, you start from the centre with the title of the essay and branch out with your analysis of concepts or other ideas as they form in your mind.
The advantage of this method is that it allows you to be much more creative, because it leaves the mind as free as possible to analyse concepts, make connections and contrasts, and to pursue trains of thought. As youre restricted to using just single words or simple phrases, youre not trapped in the unnecessary task of constructing complete sentences. Most of us are familiar with the frustration of trying to catch the wealth of ideas the mind throws up, while at the same time struggling to write down the sentences theyre entangled in. As a result we see exciting ideas come and go without ever being able to record them quickly enough.
The point is that the mind can work so much faster than we can write, so we need a system that can catch all the ideas it can throw up, and give us the freedom to put them into whatever order or form appears to be right. The conventional linear strategy of taking notes restricts us in both of these ways. Not only does it tie us down to constructing complete sentences, or at least meaningful phrases, which means we lose the ideas as we struggle to find the words, but even more important, were forced to deal with the ideas in sequence, in one particular order, so that if any ideas come to us out of that sequence, we must discard them and hope we can pick them up later. Sadly, that hope is more often forlorn: when we try to recall the ideas, we just cant.
The same is true when we take linear notes from the books we read. Most of us find that once weve taken the notes were trapped within the order in which the author has dealt with the ideas and weve noted them. Its not impossible, but its difficult to escape from this. By contrast, pattern notes give us complete freedom over the final order of our ideas. Its probably best explained by comparing it to the instructions you might get from somebody if you were to ask them the way to a particular road. They would give you a linear list of instructions (e.g. First, go to the end of the road, then turn right. When you get to the traffic lights, etc.). This forces you to follow identically the route they would take themselves. If you dont, youre lost. By contrast, pattern notes are like a copy of a map or the A to Z of a large city: you can see clearly the various routes you can take, so you can make your own choices.
So mapping is one of the affective ways to organize your ideas. To make a map use a whole sheet of paper, and write your topic in the middle, with a circle around it. Then put the next idea in a circle above or below your topic, and connect the circles with lines. The lines show that the two ideas are related.