Some quizzes in this course may seem trivial, but please do them anyway. Their purpose is to get us all in a particular frame of mind.  That frame of mind is one where we pay attention to the details: the words on the page (rather than the ones we think were written), the logical links indicated by these words, and how likely it is that most if not all readers would answer the same way as we do.    

From these exercises, I would like you to take away ways of reading and assessing that you will apply when you read and assess the work of your peers in the upcoming feedback meetings.  And of course, ultimately, the idea is to be able to apply the same, literal, ways of reading and assessing to your own writing — and that is both difficult and important to achieve if we want to improve our writing.  

A quick note on the samples you will see: when the answers are easier to find, you can infer that you are looking at a better sample of writing.

Instructions 

Question 1: Extract P from the Intro

"For some time now there has been considerable skepticism about the ability of comparative cost theory to explain the actual pattern of international trade. Neither the extensive trade among the industrial countries, nor the prevalence in this trade of two-way exchanges of differentiated products, make much sense in terms of standard theory. As a result, many people have concluded that a new framework for analyzing trade is needed."

From paragraph 1 of https://www.jstor.org/stable/1805774?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Question 2: Identify R provoked

What R is provoked by the P you just extracted?

Your HW 1 file has three parts you need to complete before our first feedback session:

1. Complete the RAP template
2. Write Part 1 of the Introduction 
3. Prepare for the next step: write list of all headings and subheadings and complete takeaways table

You will exchange feedback on all of the above with a peer at the first feedback session.

Before the feedback meeting, you can do a quick self-check using these guidelines: 

2-minute video

A:

I propose a framework in which...

 (See if you can distill a 1-sentence A from the paper:  https://www.jstor.org/stable/1805774?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents)

Question 3: Extract a P

Here are the first 4 paras of a paper

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

A structure for nucleic acid has already been proposed by Pauling and Corey1. They kindly made their manuscript available to us in advance of publication. Their model consists of three intertwined chains, with the phosphates near the fibre axis, and the bases on the outside. In our opinion, this structure is unsatisfactory for two reasons : (1) We believe that the material which gives the X-ray diagrams is the salt, not the free acid. Without the acidic hydrogen atoms it is not clear what forces would hold the structure together, especially as the negatively charged phosphates near the axis will repel each other. (2) Some of the van der Waals distances appear to be too small.

Another three-chain structure has also been suggested by Fraser (in the press). In his model the phosphates are on the outside and the bases on the inside, linked together by hydrogen bonds. This structure as described is rather ill-defined, and for this reason we shall not comment on it.

We wish to put forward a radically different structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid...

From https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0 Links to an external site.

Open access here:  http://dosequis.colorado.edu/Courses/MethodsLogic/papers/WatsonCrick1953.pdf 

Question 4: Extract a P

 Another Introduction:

Language comprehension has often been characterized as a continual testing and updating of hypotheses about the words that are likely to occur next in a text or conversation (1). For example, most people familiar with English would complete the sentence “I take coffee with cream and _______” with the word “sugar,” although reasonable alternatives exist. In general, words that expected in a given context are recognized, remembered, and verbalized more rapidly and accurately than the same stimuli presented alone or in a semantically inappropriate context (2).

We have investigated event-related brain potentials (ERP’s) that occur when an inappropriate word occurs unexpectedly at the end of a sentence. This approach stemmed from extensive human research showing that certain components recorded from the scalp are sensitive to a person’s expectations. In particular, unexpected or surprising stimuli are typically followed after some 300 to 600 msec by a positive ERP component known as the P300 (3).

We now report, however, that an occasional semantic deviation of a word in a sentence is followed by a negative brain wave (N400) that is quite distinct from the P300 and associated waves (4).

From https://science.sciencemag.org/content/207/4427/203 Links to an external site.

Open access here: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/CNL/kutas-hillyard80.pdf 

Question 5: Extract a P

Here is another Intro

Government regulation of news media ownership in the United States is built on two propositions. The first is that news content has a powerful impact on politics, with ideologically diverse content producing socially desirable outcomes. According to the U.S. Supreme Court (1945), “One of the most vital of all general interests [ is ] the dissemination of news from as many different sources, and with as many different facets and colors as is possible. That interest...presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection."

The second proposition is that unregulated markets will tend to produce too little ideological diversity. The highly influential Hutchins Commission report identified cross-market consolidation in newspaper ownership as a major obstacle to the emergence of truth in the press (Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947)). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “has traditionally assumed that there is a positive correlation between viewpoints expressed and ownership of an outlet. The Commission has sought, therefore, to diffuse ownership of media outlets among multiple firms in order to diversify the viewpoints available to the public” (FCC (2003)). This belief has justified significant controls on cross-market consolidation in broadcast media ownership, on foreign ownership of media, and on cross-media ownership within markets, and has motivated a sizable academic literature arguing that current media ownership is too concentrated (Bagdikian (2000)).

That news content can have significant effects on political attitudes and outcomes has been documented empirically by Strömberg (2004), Gentzkow and Shapiro (2004), Gentzkow (2006), Gerber, Karlan, and Bergan (2009), DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007), and others. In contrast, evidence on the incentives that shape ideological content and on the role of ownership, in particular, is limited. Existing studies have generally relied on hand collection and coding of news content, and so have been restricted to small numbers of sources (e.g., Glasser, Allen, and Blanks (1989), Pritchard (2002)). Groseclose and Milyo (2005) made an important contribution, proposing a new measure of ideological content based on counts of think-tank citations. However, their index was calculated only for a small number of outlets, and has not been used to analyze the determinants of slant.

From the Introduction of https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA7195 Links to an external site.

Open access here: https://www.brown.edu/Research/Shapiro/pdfs/biasmeas.pdf 

Question 6: Infer R from P

P: Previous studies of the connection between school enrollment size and student achievement use cross-sectional econometric models and thus do not account for unobserved heterogeneity across schools.

Bonus Question: Infer P of papers you know and discuss with others 

On your own:

• Choose 6 papers in your field of study, preferably with some of them being related.
• For each paper:
  • Read the first page of the Introduction. If the paper has a Literature Review Section, skim over it.
  • Write down the P you infer: a single statement showing i) that there is something worth knowing ii) that is as yet unknown.  
  • Assess P. Identify what furthr details are needed to support this P.  Can you easily find them in the paper (where you expect to find them)? Where applicable, think about what could have been done differently/better.
     

Discuss with a peer/professor:

• Share the P you inferred.  Is it also what they infer?
• Share your assessment.  Do they agree?

(10 minutes) Looking Ahead to Layer 3: How P will help us draft Part 1 of the Introduction

**This video explains how to build the entire Intro. We will focus only on Part 1 of the Intro**

Let us start by planning paragraphs in a special section: the Introduction.  

You can think of the Introduction as having two parts, each with a different role:

• Part 1 of the Introduction is usually the first paragraph or two.  Part 1 welcomes the reader in by positioning the paper: by showing what space it occupies in the literature and why it would be a valuable addition to that literature.  The paragraphs in Part 1 are built following the logic of P from your RAP.

• Part 2 is the rest of the Introduction.  It tells readers about the paper itself.  Readers infer that they have segued into Part 2 when the writer switches from talking about the context in which it makes sense to write the paper to talking about the paper itself.  The beginning of Part 2 is therefore usually marked by the first appearance of a phrase like "This paper" or another phrase with "we" or "our paper" in it.  These words signal to readers that we are now going to be talking about this paper. Part 2 of the Intro is made up of "regular" paragraphs that follow the basic structural rules of such paragraphs.

Watch the first 6.5 minutes of this 26-minute video on the overall structure of the Introduction.