Writing Exercises - That’s Interesting!
Identify the techniques you can use to make your study more interesting
Sociologist Murray Davis (1971) wrote an iconic article that’s been assigned in research design seminars everywhere for the last fifty years. In it he develops a typology of interestingness that I call Davis’s Index of the Interesting. I summarize his index in Chapter 5 of my book. Use Davis’s Index of the Interesting to go through two or three published articles you like. Identify the means for making a study interesting they employed. (It can be more than one).
After you’ve gotten the feel for this with a few published articles, take one of your papers and do the same assessment. Which techniques did you use? Try to identify at least one other Index of the Interesting technique that you could employ. How would you need to change your paper to incorporate this new way of making your study interesting? Try writing it, and see what happens.
© 2021 Timothy G. Pollock
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