3 Advice on essay writing
Essay-writing forms an important part of this course’s assignments and examinations. Here are some essay-writing tips that have proved useful for Music & Science students in the past:
Efficient use of words. In many cases scientific essays can be improved by compressing them down to a shorter length. This happens through two main mechanisms:
Eliminating excess verbiage. I often read sentences that use forty words when twenty would do. Bad: “Many different hypotheses and theories concerning consonance have been argued about in the music psychology literature”. Better: “The literature contains many competing theories of consonance”. One good way to eliminate excess verbiage is to edit your work relentlessly until you make the word count as small as possible while preserving the important content. A second good way is to speak your sentences out loud; excessively wordy passages will often feel somewhat awkward when spoken out loud.
Focusing on the question. Often essays contain paragraphs of background information (e.g. concerning mechanisms of pitch perception) that do not directly address the essay question. This kind of writing fills up space without getting you (much) credit in the exam. Relatively little value is attributed to producing generic paragraphs that could be found in many different essays; the main reward comes from paragraphs that directly address the essay question. The trick is to find a way of demonstrating your knowledge for the relevant topics while constantly filtering this knowledge through the lens of the essay question.
Topic sentences. The topic of a paragraph should be absolutely clear from that paragraph’s opening sentence, which we term the ‘topic sentence’. This sentence should make a clear statement that could, if necessary, stand as a replacement for the whole paragraph. The remainder of the paragraph then provides additional context for this statement.
Quotations. We don’t use quotations very commonly in scientific writing. An exception would be if you’re debating a particular claim of a particular researcher where the wording is so brilliant (or conversely opaque) that paraphrasing it would spoil it. The examples I saw in the submitted essays mostly didn’t fulfil this criterion, they were mainly just excerpts from textbooks or review articles. In these cases it’s better instead to paraphrase the relevant passage and include a citation or two.
Citations. It’s great to be including some citations in your work. The most important citations correspond to primary literature (i.e. the papers that report original experiments or theoretical proposals) rather than to secondary literature (review articles/textbooks). For example, if I talk about the Geneva Emotional Music Scale, I must cite Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer (2008), because this is the original paper that introduced the scale. Likewise, if I talk about Narmour’s Implication-Realisation model, I should cite Narmour (1990, 1992), which originally introduced the model.
When citing secondary literature, you need to be quite careful about what literature you cite for what claims. For example, you could write “There are currently three main psychological theories for the origins of consonance: interference between partials, harmonicity, and cultural familiarity (Harrison & Pearce, 2020)”, because this paper makes a specific and somewhat opinionated claim that the psychological theories can be organised into these categories. If you wanted to say “Pitch is the perceptual correlate of a sound’s fundamental frequency”, then it would be bad practice to cite Harrison & Pearce (2020); even though this fact is contained in this article, it feels wrong to cite the article, because it’s not a real authority on pitch perception, being rather focused on consonance perception. Instead, you could write something like “Pitch is the perceptual correlate of a sound’s fundamental frequency (see e.g. Stainsby & Cross, 2009)”. Stainsby & Cross’s article is specifically about pitch perception, which makes it a better one to cite. By writing “see e.g.”, you’re making it clear that you know this isn’t necessarily a definitive or unique source on the matter, but it’s just an example source where the reader could follow up this piece of common knowledge. Citations to secondary literature are generally less essential and I wouldn’t invest too much time in worrying about them; the primary literature is more important.
Finding literature. You are in a lucky position of studying a scientific topic about which you already have a lot of intuition. Often you will find yourself in a position where you think “oh, there must be a study about whether monkeys can perceive music”, or similar. It is amazing how quickly you can find such literature nowadays. I recommend familiarising yourself with Google Scholar, by which you can easily search a huge amount of scholarly papers using keywords. With a little practice, you can inject interesting literature references into your essays that really add colour and distinctiveness to your work.
Finding musical examples. Musical examples are another excellent way to add distinctive colour to your essays. Each of you will be familiar with your own musical repertoires. As you revisit the different topics in the course, try and relate the scientific discussions to music you already know well. When it comes to the exam, this music could provide a rich source for musical examples for your essays.