The Importance of Research Writing in Psychology
Psychology is a science and not an art. It fascinates me when students debate over how they can make their report more 'attractive.'This is a very poor objective, for the essence of a good report is its communicative ability and not the creativity of the report writer. Try an exercise of empathy here. Imagine you are a researcher who has decided to investigate the impact of regular smoking on female adolescents. Now, as a first step in your research, you will look at past studies done in this area, to find out how much is already known, and gauge what is still desired to be known. Suppose you find fifty relevant, published articles on this topic.Now imagine these were all written in different formats, and every writer had decided for him/herself how much to report and how much to omit. You find that some reports cover fifty pages of narratives including the writer's own opinions and struggles with the topic; while others complete the entire report in two paragraphs...