Step Three: Teach them how to craft a POV
Endemic
Each discipline comes equipped with a particular way of viewing the world. These perspectives categorize the field into everything from its sub-disciplines to its methodology to its content and practice. Practitioners are recognized because they “think/act like a [insert discipline here]”. Newcomers are legitimized as they become conversant in these categories. An easy example is the clinical process in medicine: symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis.
Provide a map of the endemic categories to review writers and practice forming questions — this will help them begin to ask and answer questions as does someone in your discipline. The map below is one example — we use this with undergrads in the health sciences, and it has helped them form better questions, and hence search the literature and analyze it better. The second was constructed to show that the humanities have just as much “structure” as the sciences.
[insert focus your review paper map]
[insert endemic humanities map]
Emergent
For more advanced writers or to push creativity, encourage “emergent” categories. One definition of emergent thinking is the novel understanding that emerges when someone has had a long time to dwell with information — a eureka moment when a different way of seeing the material suddenly emerges. Sometimes emergent analyses are moments of idiosyncratic brilliance; sometimes they attain the status of memes, such as the zombification that swept across disciplines as a metaphor for everything from food production to supply chain management to ways of characterizing Alzheimer’s patients [link to each].
Emergent POVs are occasionally truly novel, representing a re-visioning of a field, akin to a paradigm shift or new theoretical model. More commonly, emergent POVs are borrowings across disciplines — applying a principle in physics to mental phenomenon or a concept from semiotics to economics.
It’s hard to predict when an emergent POV will show up, but using them with advanced students can produce interesting results and help students loosen up thinking. This skill is increasingly valued as nearly everyone has to work across disciplines, with different audiences, and via new technologies. Students can take a current paper and imagine it from a different perspective or through the lens of a different discipline. Or, play with more extreme ideas, e.g. what would this thing look like if it took place in an aquarium or a different period in history?
Practice thinking before writing
Use excerpts or abstracts to practice thinking in a discipline before students begin writing in a discipline. Find 4-5 papers on the same topic, then ask students to explore various ways of approaching what seems like the same information. For example, a handful of abstracts on medications for ADHD very quickly reveals many of the ways the medical world divvies up the world: amphetamine vs non-amphetamine, degrees of side effects, side effects according to category (physiological, physical, behavioral, academic, social), side effects from patients or caregivers experience, age, gender, environment, compliance. Students can then work together to create many of the sort of focused and discipline-appropriate questions that you’d expect from practitioners, from the simpler “what are the side effects of amphetamine-based medications for ADHD” to the more complicated “what side effects of ADHD medications are most likely to result in patient non-compliance?” This exercise models the thinking involved, which we want very much to be in place before students begin writing.
Page 2 — Step One: Teach the literature in your field
Page 3 — Step Two: Start with a short, controlled paper
Page 4 — Step Three: Teach students how to craft a point of view
Page 5 — Scheduling and Scaffolding