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I think I believe you are talking through your hat.

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Edited by Sebastian Tyrrell, Tuesday, 20 Mar 2012, 13:48

I think I believe you are talking through your hat.

As we approach the final TMA it is worth reinforcing some important points about the critical analyses (and the various variants of a critical analysis such as critical summaries, compare and contrast, etc) and how to approach them. It is quite likely that you have found these difficult in the previous TMAs, especially if you have not studied much at post-graduate level, but they represent a key skill for studying and analysing information in an critical, objective light and they are well worth persevering with.

I am not going to rehash the information on the course website, but would once again encourage you to read it. My focus will be a little different, and give you some clear don'ts.

Firstly, any sentence that starts with the words "I believe" or "I think" (or indeed any equivalent formulation) and then proceeds to make an assertion without offering any supporting evidence is unlikely to gain any credit. Unsupported opinion is not critical analysis.

You may, conceivably, think that the paper doesn't provide sufficient evidence for a conclusion that it draws. You should state that, say what if any evidence it does provide for or against, what it may have missed and why you consider the evidence insufficient - I may agree, I may disagree (in which I will tell you why) - but putting the words "I think" in there won't add value and detracts from a limited word count.

Secondly, and closely related, be careful with the use of personal experience. Personal experience, for example on a project you have worked on, can be very valuable and indeed we would encourage you to think about the topics in the light of your own experience but you must show that you are aware of the difficulty in drawing firm conclusions from such limited data: a particular technique may not have been successful for you but it is difficult to separate the evaluation of the technique from the project and organisational culture you were working in at the time. In engineering we don't in general have randomised controlled trials of course, so observational evidence is often the best evidence we have, but you need to be aware of the limitations.

Thirdly, and coming on to some more practical points, don't bite off too much. You may have found two or more papers rather than just the one - that is fine but you will need to be very concise and focus on clear points you want to make. You have 500 words: it is better to use a single additional paper, or stick to a clear theme that cuts across two or three, than to pick a mishmash of points that don't fit well into a narrative.

Fourthly be aware of those word limits and stick to them. Don't worry too much about writing style - if it reads well that is great (and I may be less likely to count the words) but content is more important.

Fifthly, and finally (for now),a particular point for those for whom English is not their first language. Machine translation tools such as Google Translate should be used with the utmost care: they are powerful and valuable tools but they can very easily lead you astray.

You should never, ever, submit an analysis where you do not understand fully the text you are submitting: a really good piece written in German, submitted to MT (Machine Translation) for translation into English and the result cut and pasted into your TMA will get very poor marks. Not because the use of MT is frowned upon but because the output will almost certainly be gibberish - unreadable and incomprehensible - even if many of the right words are there.

If you use MT you should try to use it in the other direction: write the point you are trying to make in English and then translate to your native language to see if you are saying what you want to say.

It is far better in any case to produce short, precise sentences - bullet points if necessary - rather than complex prose in which the point you want to make can too easily get lost. Yes, you might not gain full style marks but you will get better marks for content.

Hope this helps you all a little, good luck and contact me if you need anything.

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