Because writing is a reflective process in which writers critically reflect concepts they obtain from reading activities and develop arguments based on the acquired/comprehended concepts, reading block can simply be  understood as inadequate reading #NoDrama. Read!

Kita (termasuk saya) sering lupa bahwa pengetahuan dalam bidang tertentu (knowledge of a particular subject) berbeda dari pengetahuan dan ketrampilan pedagogis untuk pengajaran bidang tersebut (pedagogical knowledge and skills of the subject). Sehingga, kita sering terjebak pada analogi ‘pemain sepak bola yang jago adalah pelatih yang baik untuk siswa sekolah sepak bola’ atau analogi ‘mike tyson adalah pelatih tinju terbaik karena dia adalah juara dunia tinju’. Apakah Cus D’Amato seorang boxer kelas dunia?

It’s easier for us to see our inabilities and doubts, which prevent us from trying, doing and achieving. Perfection is shadowing us, making it difficult to accept flaws and failures.

Well, my friends. Focus on abilities and confidence. Try, do and achieve. Perfection is a myth. It’s ok to get 7 out of 10, or even 5. Believe in yourself. Let’s accept our flaws and failures as part of our journey to achievements. Without the pain, our gain would be plain.

Everybody is playing a game and sometimes they will take you into the field and push you to play it. If you do, there will be two possible results: you win the game or you lose it. Because it’s not your game, the probability that you lose is greater. They set the rules.

Leave it.

Not playing the game doesn’t mean you lose. That means you have your own rules and won’t let others drag you. Leave their game.

Life is like riding a motorcycle.
You will face the wind and rain, but you always have the option to accelerate. Focus on the destination. Just make sure you keep your balance and enjoy the ride. Be grateful for the journey. #life

Membenci dan berkata buruk tentang makanan saja tidak boleh, apalagi membenci sesama manusia

Sepatutnya biasa saja. Membenci orang lain karena berbeda dari kita itu bentuk pengingkaran kenyataan bahwa kita juga tidak sempurna, dan mungkin ada orang lain yang membenci kita karena ketidaksempurnaan itu. Membenci orang lain karena berbeda juga bisa jadi bentuk kesombongan, karena kita menilai orang lain tidak lebih baik dari kita.

Paijo malah ikut tertawa ketika beberapa orang di dalam ruangan itu menertawakan dirinya. Mungkin karena jengkel, orang-orang itu semakin semangat mengolok dan menertawakan Paijo. Tapi Paijo memang aneh. Semakin keras mereka tertawa, semakin keras pula tawa Paijo. Bhahaha…

Mungkin level jengkel mereka sudah memuncak, sampai akhirnya mereka berteriak. ‘Gendeng kowe jo, tak guyu kok kamu ngguyu. Kamu edan ya, kami tertawakan kok kamu tertawa juga’.

Dengan tawa yang dia nikmati, Paijo menjawab ‘Bhahaha… Jangankan sampeyan, saya sendiri lo menertawakan diri saya. Memang bodoh saya ini haha… Saya ikut menikmati kebahagiaan sampeyan menertawakan orang lain’.

‘Pancen edan!’ Umpat salah satu dari mereka sambil bergerak menjauh. Kemudian, semua ikut berjalan menjauh, meninggalkan Paijo sendiri di dalam ruangan.

Paijo mendekati kursi di sisi ruangan. Duduk tenang, dia menikmati kopi yang sudah tidak panas lagi. Dia biasa saja.

Paijo sudah terlatih remuk hati. Bully itu semacam biskuit yang sering dia nikmati di masa lalu. Sudah biasa. Dia tahu, menyangkal dan melawan orang lain yang menertawakan tidak akan membuatnya merasa lebih baik. Sebaliknya, menerima kekurangan dirinya dan ikut tertawa membuatnya lebih kuat.

Pelan, Paijo bergumam ‘it’s the power of self-acceptance bro’

Seperti anjuran untuk menyelamatkan hutan dan pepohonan yang dicetak di atas berlembar-lembar kertas

Seperti manusia yang berharap surga, percaya bahwa dunia hanya tempat persinggahan sementara, tapi berebut dunia seperti hidup selamanya

Sesekali saya biarkan anak-anak kalah, supaya mereka mengerti bahwa terkalahkan itu manusiawi, supaya mereka bisa menerima kenyataan bahwa hidup tidak melulu tentang kemenangan dan keberhasilan.

Alasan lain yang lebih penting. Saya biarkan mereka kalah supaya mereka bisa menjadi lebih peka hati dan penuh kasih, bisa berempati, bisa merasakan apa yang dirasakan oleh orang lain, sehingga mereka tidak jumawa terhadap kemenangan dan pencapaian.

Sesekali biarkan mereka kalah, agar mereka tidak menjadi manusia egois.

Seorang teman datang dengan penuh emosi. ‘Kurang ajar penulis itu. Dia menulis kalimat-kalimat yang tidak bisa saya terima. Saya tersinggung’.

‘Sik, kenapa bro?’ saya bertanya lewat jalur panggilan yang samar, mungkin jaringan sedang tidak baik.

‘Dia menulis kalimat begitu, maksudnya pasti menyinggung saya. Saya emosi’.

𝐃𝐮𝐚 𝐡𝐚𝐥 𝐲𝐚𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐚𝐣𝐢𝐛 𝐝𝐢𝐤𝐮𝐚𝐬𝐚𝐢 𝐦𝐚𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐰𝐚 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐤𝐚𝐢𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐧 ‘𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠’ – 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐢𝐤𝐢𝐫.

(1). Systematic Thinking – banyak mahasiswa di berbagai level masih belum bisa berpikir sistematis. Kemampuan untuk mengorganisir informasi masih belum cukup baik.

(2). Critical Thinking – belum mampu dan belum ‘berani’ berpikir kritis, cenderung menerima konsep/ide dan pandangan tanpa evaluasi kritis yang cukup.

Sekitar tahun 2008, bersama beberapa teman, saya terlibat dalam proyek Microsoft for Indonesia. Salah satu tujuan proyek tersebut adalah mengukur computer literacy guru-guru dan siswa di beberapa daerah.

Banyak hal menggembirakan. Namun, kita juga menemukan kondisi yang membuat kita sedih.

Pada umumnya, sekolah sudah memiliki komputer (dan lab), tapi banyak siswa dan beberapa guru tidak mempunyai akses menggunakan komputer (akses ya, bukan kepemilikan komputer atau laptop). Saat itu, masih banyak guru tidak memiliki komputer atau laptop personal, sehingga satu komputer digunakan 4 sampai 6 guru.

Selain pertanyaan ‘how’s the progress?’ dan ‘what chapter are you working on?’ – pertanyaan lain yang sering diajukan pembimbing riset doktoral saya adalah ‘are you ok?’ – ‘are you feeling ok?’.

Yes, student well-being adalah salah satu aspek penting dari studi. Studi (dan hampir semua layanan kampus) sangat berorientasi pada mahasiswa. Dalam proses studi, pembimbing bertanggung jawab akan dua hal, penyelesaian riset dan student well-being.

Saya akan fokus ke student well-being. Apa dampaknya terhadap mahasiswa? Saya merasa nyaman dan menikmati masa studi (malah kalau boleh studi lagi, saya mau 😁 #ngarep). Saya merasa mendapatkan banyak hal, bukan sekedar ilmu, tetapi pengalaman hidup. Living experience, seperti yang dijanjikan di iklan-iklan kampus luar negeri. Hah? Apalagi itu living experience?

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Scientific manuscript writing requires writers (researchers) to use various genres (cognitive genres – Bruce, 2008). In this post, I arrange the sample practices provided by UEfAP based on the basic structure of a scientific article. The arrangement will help you understand how particular genres are used in article sections, and allow you to compare genres employed in different sections (by doing the practices). You can start with the introduction [1], and then finish the other sections.

[1] Writing an Introduction

[2] Writing the Method Section

[3] Writing the Results Section

[4] Writing the Discussion 

[5] Writing the Conclusions

[6] Writing an Abstract

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If you are looking for updated references for your English-related studies, you can use the reference lists provided by the International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF). Download HERE

Summarizing various reasons for rejection of scientific manuscripts, Lucey (2015) proposed 12 dominant factors:

1. Clarity: the paper needs to tell us what it is doing. If there are a host of good ideas all crowding each other out then in the confines of the space available in a modern journal article this is going to present a problem. Without getting into salami slicing, where a host of papers are created from one base, each differing only minutely form each other, the rubric of “One for One”, one major idea per paper, is one to live by. That way you can present a tightly argued, clear, organised paper. The other ideas go in other papers. Ask yourself – is this tightly coherent.

2. Fit: It still astonishes me how often I see papers that are simply not within the aims and scope of the journal. How hard can it be to check have similar papers been published in the last few years, to read the journal homepage, to perhaps even email the editor or an associate editor? Again, this is not to say that journals shouldn’t, and perhaps even have a responsibility to, go outside the box a little, but sending a theory paper to an empirical journal, or a paper on international trade to one focusing on corporate finance suggests sloppy preparation and a lack of clarity. Check if it fits.

3. Contribution: I mentioned salami slicing. In empirical papers this most often appears where one or two variables or approaches are changed and a new paper produced. Thus one paper uses one methodology and another a similar, with essentially the same explanatory variable set. Really this is down to referees and editors, where the dreaded “robustness checks” are required to be shown. Let the reader feel they learned something

4. Triviality: Some things, if not known (can anything be known, really, in social science?) are well accepted. A paper that demonstrates already well attributed findings but in another setting, that is hard to publish. In my area this usually manifests itself as a paper that takes a concept or finding from developed or increasingly emerging markets, applies it to a frontier market and finds the same findings. Salami slicing works this way also, or rather, not. Give the reader a solid reason for reading the paper

5. Coherence: Some papers are a mess. There is a good reason for, and again this is in my area, a conventional layout: introduction, previous literature, data and methodology, findings, robustness checks, conclusion and recommendations. It works to aid the writer and more important the reader in understanding the flow of the paper. Too many or too few sections, lack of integration across same, a sense where there are multiple authors of multiple voices rather than one, all these make it hard to read and hard to understand. Remember, this is a discourse, a communication. Make the paper clear

6. Completeness: some papers are simply not complete. For most publishers now there is a technical screening before it hits the editor; are the manuscripts, tables, figures, data etc. in the submission? Has it passed the plagiarism screening? Is it legible? Sometimes people simply forget to include material. It is uncommon but not unknown to have papers that have <to be added – Jim> or something similar. If it’s not complete, it’s not going anywhere. Complete the paper.

7. Legibility: At times I feel like channelling Samuel L. Jackson, discussing linguistics with Brett, in Pulp Fiction. English is overwhelmingly the language of academic publishing. If the language is poorly structured, riddled with errors syntactical and lexical, then it’s going to be rejected. Get it proofread, even if you are a native English speaker.

8. Correctness. A paper needs, especially if it is going to challenge established wisdom, to be very well constructed and to leave the reader feeling that yes there is a solid challenge. If the paper misses a whole pile of literature, has bad statistics, overambitious conclusions drawn from fuzzy data, is in general riddled with poor science, then it’s going to go down. Alternative perspectives are great, but being wrong is an alternative to being right. Check your science.

9. Strength: This is often the case when papers are from junior researchers or are driving forward a new area. At the end we want to know – so now what do we do or where do we go? If the paper cant tell us that, perhaps because of some of the other issues noted here or because the paper spent too long or in too rambling a way to get to the point, then it is not going to prosper. Make it strong but grounded.

10. Replicability: Data integrity and replicability are becoming key concerns of journal editors. Some have adopted a policy of having data and commands deposited with the paper. In general however the paper should be complete in its descriptions so that someone with the same or similar data can reproduce the flow. Explain what data, where sourced, what cleaning etc.; outline the nature of the theoretical steps; explain the experiments. Many of these explanations, which can be quite long, can be placed now as supplemental appendices, and should be so done. That way the paper as such can be short and pointed and the interested replicator can go to the appendices for detail. If there is a sense that this can’t be replicated, then it’s incomplete and poorly written and will crash. Make it reproducible

11. Courtesy: The academy is quite small once you get into paper writing and reviewing. I have had occasion to reject a paper from a journal knowing, as I had been the reviewer just two weeks before, that the paper authors had not made any effort to address my previous concerns. That doesn’t mean agreeing with them, it does mean addressing them. Sending a literally identical paper sequentially rejected to a multiple of journals will get you a bad reputation and you WILL meet as editors or other gatekeepers people whose views you have blown off. Address the concerns.

12. Bad Luck: ideas and topics go into and out of vogue. It is not uncommon to see two or more similar papers addressing similar areas being submitted. In that case there is an element of luck. Generally I will try to track back, via working papers dates, and see who has some claim on priority. This, by the way, is another reason why working papers and conference presentations are useful; they show intellectual priority. At any rate, Solomonic judgements are sometimes required. Be swift, but sure, I suggest.

Ref. https://brianmlucey.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/a-dozen-ways-to-get-your-academic-paper-rejected/

Typical rhetorical functions used in academic writing

Descriptive

1. Describing objects, location, structure and direction
2. Reporting and narrating
3. Defining
4. Writing instructions
5. Describing function
6. Describing processes, developments and operations
7. Classifying / categorising
8. Giving examples
9. Including tables and charts

Critical

10. Writing critically
11. Arguing and discussing
12. Evaluating other points of view
13. Comparing and contrasting: similarities and differences
14. Generalising
15. Expressing degrees of certainty
16. Expressing reasons and explanations / cause and effect
17. Expressing feelings
18. Analysing
19. Planning action
20. Providing support
21. Application
22. Working with different voices and finding your own
23. Taking a stance
24. Using theory
25. Persuading
40. Introducing
41. Using previous research
42. Indicating a gap
43. Presenting findings from statistical analyses
44. Presenting findings from interviews
45. Discussing limitations
46. Drawing conclusions
47. Recommendations
48. Implications

Reflective

1. Writing reflectively

Source: http://www.uefap.com/writing/function/funcfram.htm

Most people read scientific articles by following the structure of the articles, starting from the first section until the last one. This is the most common method, but I found it inefficient.
.
Here is my method.
.
Skim the abstract quickly
Go to the conclusions/summary section and identify the author’s main conclusions/arguments
Flip through the article to look at the research data supporting the conclusions; identify the most prominent data.
Now, you can start reading the introduction.

Saya sudah banyak berlatih berbicara dan menulis, tapi hasilnya belum baik. Kenapa?

Karena ucapan dan tulisan adalah produk olah pikir, maka yang harus ditingkatkan atau diperbaiki adalah pola pikir (kemampuan berpikir sistematis), bukan sekedar berlatih berbicara atau menulis.

Pembicara dan penulis yang baik mampu berpikir secara sistematis dan menata ide dengan baik sehingga ucapan dan tulisannya bisa dipahami audiensi*.

Read this first – Writing the Introduction

How should you write the section? What are important points you should include in the section Ok. Let’s use the Q&A method. Here are key questions you need to answer for completing the methodology part of your scientific article.

Writing an introduction is not easy. Writers (researchers) often face the challenging question of how to write the introduction part of a scientific article. In my workshop, I use a Q&A method to help writers (researchers) identify key points which should be included in the introduction. If you can answer most of these questions, then you are ready to write the introduction part of your scientific article. What you need to do next is to arrange the answers to these questions into paragraphs. Pay attention to the coherence and cohesion. So, here are the questions. Ready?
.
𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 ⬇️
.
What is the general topic of the manuscript?
Why is the topic important?
Are there any data or research findings related to the topic?
What do the data or research findings say about the topic?
Are there any grand theories related to the topic?
What do the theories propose?
Are there any practical aspects/implications or regulations related to the topic?
How does the topic affect practical aspects? Are there any practical implications?
How are the regulations related to the topic?
.
𝗟𝗲𝘁’𝘀 𝗯𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰 ⬇️
.
What is the main research question? Or- what is the specific issue the article addresses?
What is the main objective of the article?
Why is it important to address the main research question?
Why is it important to achieve the main objective?
What do available data or research findings say about the specific issue?
Are there any grand theories related to the specific issue?
What do the theories say about the specific topic?
.
Great! Now you are ready to write the introduction part of your article.

You might find the two phrases confusing. So, here are a brief explanation about the two phrases and sample sentences.

In nontechnical sense, ‘Log on’ means visiting (without using a username and password) while ‘log in’ means signing in with a username and password (or- sign in).

Sample sentences:

The user can log on to a website operated by such entity to read the message.

Facebook now requires Belgium users to log in to view pages.