A Few Notes on Paper 1

1. I was impressed with the average editing quality. For a first paper round, this was higher than I have ever seen it. The average was 26/30, which is just under the A boundary of 27.

2. Compared to the editing success, the paper grade wasn't quite as high, with an average of 83. That is, several students did A-quality editing on other people but wrote a B-quality paper. I looked carefully at a few examples and found that, at least some of you, are much better editors of others' writing than you are of your own writing. This should be one of your goals for paper 2 - to translate your ability to recognize problems in others' papers into the ability to recognize problems in your own (and fix them).

3. If some of my markings are confusing (I usually used purple ink), I use wavy underlines for odd or awkward wording or phrasing; the symbol awk stands for "awkward," the symbol ungramm for "ungrammatical," a question mark for "unclear" or "I don't understand."

4. I have been impressed by the fact that several "typical" writing errors were rare (e.g., its vs. it's). Here are a couple of more frequent errors:

   • Using while (which means "at the same time as") as a synonym for "although" or "even though";
   • mixing up which and that (e.g., "The car that had parked here...", NOT "The car which had parked here.." BUT "The car, which was green, looked like a UO fan-van.")

5. Some of you offered critical thoughts about articles. I very much welcome such criticism. However, you have to be critical of your own arguments. For example, some of you identified an extraneous factor (such as gender, or personality, or background) that "could have affected the results." This is not enough as an argument. The factor of concern would have to specifically influence the experimental group differently from the control group, otherwise random assignment takes care of the influence of said factor.

6. One thing I would like to clarify is that none of the articles we read provided any evidence that people with chronically low self-esteem are more prejudiced or use more stereotypes. All they showed was that if you temporarily affirm the person's self-integrity, they become less defensive and less prejudiced; and that when people apply stereotypes they temporarily feel better about themselves (state self-esteem). There is good reason to believe that it is people with generally high self-esteem who are more vulnerable to threatening information and may be engaged in more self-image maintenance (because they have more to lose!). Studies by Roy Baumeister show, for example, that high self-esteem individuals, more than low-self-esteem individuals, use aggression to fend off threats and thereby make themselves feel superior to the other person.