In a graduate-level academic program, you will find that
many of the assignments and discussion prompts require you to write your
opinion on a topic or to write about your personal experiences with
something. You might find you can easily
write a response that has no references or citations because you are already an
expert in your field. BUT…(there is
always a but)…an important outcome of graduate-level academic programs is to
improve critical thinking skills.
What does that mean? In
academic writing (which is what we do in an academic program), you want to give
evidence that your personal experience or opinion is grounded in research or a body of
knowledge. You do this by giving
examples or finding something in the literature that supports your perspective
(which in essence, is your argument – your point of view with support from other
expert perspectives).
To give a very simplistic, completely fictitious example,
consider this…I live in Kentucky and love
to take my kayak on the small rivers near my home. This is a very personal statement
that expresses my personal experience and has no support. In academic writing, my statement has little
merit at all. Now, if I write the same
idea this way… Like approximately 17,500
other people living in Kentucky who enjoy kayaking on small rivers (Smith,
2014), I love to take my kayak on small rivers near my home. Now you can put my statement in context
with something that has been studied and is grounded in research.
To give another example, I could write I really like Facebook, but Twitter is less appealing. Now you know that I am a person who prefers
Facebook over Twitter, but that’s all you know.
Compare that to this: I really like Facebook, but Twitter is less
appealing. Smith (2014) studied adults more
than 30 years old and concluded that many preferred Facebook because it was
more intuitive to use and more of their friends used it as compared to
Twitter. Now you know my preference
and you see that I have considered whether or not my preference is typical. You also know that preference of social media
sites has been studied by at least one researcher, and you could even look up my
reference to read more on the topic.
