Your Marker Is Exhausted. Here's What You Can Do About It.

Your thesis marker is tired. They've been given a big pile of theses and only a couple of weeks to read, write comments, and give a grade to each one. That's not the only thing on their plate. They've got the rest of their job too: running a research lab, getting a grant written, dealing with their kids.

They have that slightly exasperated look on their face, because they know nothing about your research area and the thesis in front of them is hard to read.

That exasperated look is the piece of this that you can actually change.

You can make your marker's job easier by making the moves they expect and leveraging something cognitive psychologists have been researching for years: perceptual fluency.

WHAT IS PERCEPTUAL FLUENCY?

One of my favourite things about psychology is that we can often use what the research tells us about how the human brain works to make the process of studying psychology easier. Perceptual fluency is one of those phenomena.

The general idea: the easier something is to process, the more we like it.

Researchers study this by manipulating things like how clear and crisp a font is, or how much white noise is mixed in with an audio stimulus. But the same effect applies to writing.

The easier a piece of writing is to process, the more we like it, the smarter we judge the writer to be, and, probably, the more likely we are to give that writer a high distinction.

There's a study by Oppenheimer (2005) that I love because the experimental design so closely mimics student writing. Undergraduate students rated how smart applicants for a graduate research program were based on their admission essays. The researchers had manipulated those essays, replacing every second or third word with a longer synonym to make the language unnecessarily complex. The results showed that participants rated the applicants who had written essays with unnecessarily complicated language as less intelligent and less well-suited to graduate training than applicants who had written in simple, concrete language.

Are you trying too hard to sound smart when you are writing??

HOW DOES YOUR MARKER FEEL WHEN THEY READ YOUR THESIS?

When what they're reading feels easy, they scroll smoothly down the page, following the argument. They nod and smile as they read because the ideas land well. 

When what they're reading doesn't feel easy, they grimace. They read and re-read sentences. They ask, where is this going? They feel tired, because the writer is making them do a lot of hard thinking just to extract the point. And the harder your thesis is to read, the less your marker will like it.

How do you avoid that emotional state for your marker?

YOUR JOB AS A WRITER

Your job as a writer is to make your reader's job as easy as possible. Your job is not to sound impressive or to prove you've read a lot. Your job is to make it easy for your marker to follow your argument and understand what you know. To do this, you need to make deliberate choices, at every level of your writing, that reduce the cognitive load on your reader and create perceptual fluency.

THE FOUR LEVELS

There are four levels at which you can create (or destroy) perceptual fluency:

1. Structure: Does the shape of your argument make sense? Can your reader see where you are going?

2. Words: Simple, concrete words are almost always clearer than complex, abstract ones.

3. Sentences: Active voice is easier to read than passive voice.

4. Paragraphs: Each paragraph should contain one idea, with a topic sentence that gives it away upfront.

In the next posts in this series, we'll go through each of these levels in detail covering what they look like in practice. 

This is the first post in the Make the Moves Your Marker Expects series, part of the What They Forgot to Teach You workshops from Reveal Research.

Next up: structure and words. Head to revealresearch.org to find out about upcoming sessions.