MSF Writing Guidelines
Last revised: March 18, 2005
Each minor or major project submission will follow these guidelines unless instructed otherwise. Every written work communicates. Good writing presents information that is readily understood by the appropriate audience. Ask God for help before you begin. If you have questions about an assessment then contact the grading professor early.
Communicating Knowledge
Every submission must be well-written regardless of its media or form (report, presentation, etc). This includes, as appropriate:
- A clear introduction that sets up the main theme and structure of the document, and convinces the audience to engage it.
- A coherent body or message structured to provide the audience with a guideline for how the author will present their position.
- A conclusion that calls for action based on acceptance of the document's premise.
- Taking advantage of writing style, appropriate citations and use of word processing and other software to manage formatting.
- Accurate grammar, spelling, punctuation, fluency and flow of phrases, transitions, and other appropriate stylistic needs.
- Biblical concepts drawn accurately from their surrounding scriptural context, applied aptly in the presented text and used discretely to support what is written.
APA Writing Style: Each paper must conform to APA writing style guidelines unless instructed otherwise Below are several resources that should help you get started and see how it's done:
- Basic APA writing style guidelines
- Sample paper written in APA style
- Regent University Writing Center
For more detailed information about APA style please refer to the following APA style manual:
- American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication Manual (5th ed.). Washington, DC. ISBN: 1557987912
Bear in mind that writing style manuals exist primarily to help with how to write not with how to format references. As such, comprehending and applying the beginning portions of style manuals is vital. This means you must actually read the style manual. Include reference sections, not bibliographies, in your documents. This means that every reference listed must be cited in the text, and every text citation must be in the reference list. Always separate textual sentences in all writing styles with exactly one space. Always.
A letter of transmittal is a message of intended purpose, informing the recipient what is being sent and why it should receive their consideration. Examples include correspondence accompanying manuscripts and reports. Typically you will submit your coursework via email. Therefore use the email message as your letter of transmittal. Keep the letter shorter than one page in length, unless you require additional pages specifically for required guidelines.
When writing for publication, a transmittal acts as a cover letter for an article or book manuscript submitted to a publisher. Typically these transmittal letters state the attached manuscript is for potential publication plus any related necessary information. Indicate clearly in the email message (a) the selected magazine (or book publisher), (b) the URL of the magazine author's manuscript submission guidelines or a copy of the actual guidelines, and (c) an acknowledgement that the article you are submitting fits those guidelines. See this example letter of transmittal. If you could not locate the author's guidelines, then include support for your understanding of the implied author guidelines.
Reports always go to key decision makers, so write transmittal letters specifically to them. Establish the tone for how your work will be received. If necessary, you might wish to use the opportunity to note important benefits or findings or to repair problem issues. An example might be a brief statement of how your research or interview skills improved while working on the project. Do not be obsequious however.
Audience
Each assessment will specify what audience you need to write to, whether a scholarly audience, a consulting report audience or a popular press audience. This requires that you address the appropriate audience, and convince them to accept your stance on specific issues. If a submission is to vary from the anticipated audience below, it will be identified in the instructions. It is important to maintain consistent focus on writing to a specific audience. So much so, that successful authors sometimes write to as if they are communicating to a specific person, and later alter the phrasing if necessary.
Consulting reports, such as organizational audits and diagnoses, should be written as final reports to the senior leadership of the organization. No other audience will be as directly influenced by these reports, so make an effort to address them effectively.
Target your audience, not the general organization. Presenting targeted ideas to the correct audience is part of the reason cable television is successful. Use this understanding to increase the success of your own writing.
Professional consulting reports clarify or substantiate what decision makers find obscure or not believed within their organizations. The consultant uses available gifts, knowledge, skills and abilities to perceive what is occurring, then collects and interprets available data, and presents specific, viable, problem-solving instruction in the form of reported choices to decision makers.
Consulting is structured with reality, contextualized, processed with decorum and presented in palatable terms. It often involves interviews with organizational members. Good consultants esteem people and involve them as participants, not as responding objects. In this manner, consultants discover preferred actionable distinctions in available organizational structures or processes, and report interventions that are likely to succeed so that decision makers can plan accordingly.
If leadership does not have an understandable message, who in their organizations will prepare to engage what is occurring? So it is with consulting. Unless consultants present intelligible words in understandable language, how will decision makers comprehend them? The consultant might just as well speak to the air if they do not make implicit ideas explicit through their reporting.
Target senior decision makers as your audience, not the general organization. Appreciate who the involved organizational members are and how proposed interventions will affect them. Treat them with dignity. Use understandings gained to increase the likely success that your reporting will be used.
Popular press
Popular press includes items read by the "populace." Magazine articles should be written to the magazine editor and focused on the magazine's audience. A popular press book should be written to the publisher's audience.
Select one magazine (or book publisher), and locate their author's manuscript submission guidelines. Read the author's guidelines, and compose your writing according to those guidelines. They might not be Turabian. If you cannot locate the author's guidelines, then review the feature articles (or books) to determine the required writing style for acceptable submissions.
Always follow the author guidelines of the publisher when attempting to compose documents to meet their criteria. Be prepared to furnish proof of doing so to the grading professor. The professor will use the author's guidelines to evaluate the writing style you use. Be certain to include an appropriate letter of transmittal with your submission.
World Wide Web Documents
On some assessments, you will write to a popular audience on the Internet. Individual or group position papers presented online should be written as if for a personal website. Do not presume to speak for an organization or its leadership unless instructed to do so. Web pages normally intend persuasive ends and need to include sufficient supportive references to satisfy introductory and adversarial readers.
Knowledge Demonstration
Writing for knowledge demonstration is writing to a professional, scholarly audience. You should write to demonstrate knowledge with the professor as the audience, appropriate for publication at the level of a professional applied journal, such as Harvard Business Review. These include the common types of university writing. Examples include case studies , research reports and movie assessment .
All work should show detailed use of the program concepts and sufficient understanding of their application to compare and contrast related ideas professionally. This includes thorough discussion and application of appropriate insights to support fully the "why" and "how" questions readers could pose. Offered content should add insight to context, structure, and levels of analysis viewed or processed by the professor and the student for both to gain understanding of efficient, effective and efficacious use of all presented ideas.
Audiences prefer interacting in specific ways. Professors tend to read so many poorly-formatted demonstrations of knowledge that well-formatted ones appear outstanding. Using paragraph styles rather than hard-coded formatting will improve consistency and evaluation of your presentations. Because various printers output pages differently, always use manual page breaks to force new pages—and never empty paragraphs. Most Valuable Professionals provides excellent additional information from serious professionals in its "Word MVP FAQ," including a list of tutorials for Microsoft Word.
Presentations
Presentations and accompanying materials (PowerPoint slides, notes, handouts, audience evaluation, etc.) must be prepared to address the appropriate audience and be well written. Like in any spoken address, presentations should follow an introduction, development and conclusion.
- Each slide should cover an average of two minutes of presentation content. Accordingly, a 30 minute presentation needs approximately 15 slides.
- Slides must contain narrative of the presentation in the (speaker's) notes section. Two minutes of presentation is approximately 400 spoken words.
- The best presentations make appropriate use of color. Projected presentations use light rather than paper to mediate ideas, so rather than dark on bright (such as black on white), it is usually best to use bright on dark (such as yellow on blue).
- Slides should never include dense text. Seven or eight lines of large type typically is readable from a distance; twelve lines of smaller type might not be readable at all.
- Graphic images must be clear and help emphasize the narrative.
- Sufficient, not excessive, media should be used that is appropriate for the specific audience. All selected media should be appropriate and implemented well. Use copy-able paper handouts, evaluation forms, audio or other media only if they add value to influencing the audience to adopt the premise and action called for in the presentation. Redundant (repetitive) ancillary media to the main presentation need not be turned in.
- A clear introduction in the speaker's notes should prepare the audience to understand what the presentation is about and how the presentation will support the titled premise. This begins with the opening sentence.
- Ensure there are no grammar or wordsmith errors and that the readable text flows well. Lists of phrases with points or bullets or numbers are preferred to long prose.
- Help your audience accept the intended message (and the presenters) as "smarter" and "acceptable" via accurate grammar, spelling and consistent presentation style.
Expectations
As leaders mature they learn to develop and communicate insightfully. In academic environments this is measured partially through grading expectations. When returned grading offers outcomes that are lower than expected for the effort expended, students should consider how that effort might have been used more effectively. Students have been known to work overtime on alternative processes that were not being measured.
Sometimes students feel a lack of support or feedback. This involves the affective and psychomotor domains of Bloom's taxonomy. Each semester a number of students create small groups to support each other through their studies. Results vary, but many report the feedback they desire is fostered through affiliation with these groups, be they geographically distant or collocated. One reality members of these groups quickly recognize is that feedback does not substitute for inadequate skill preparation that is likely available where they live.
The most brilliant leaders can transcend common reasoning with wisdom that unveils current and future consequences. Here are some generalized ideas of how that translates into incrementally improving grades. Notice that the percentage scores correspond with those on the syllabi. Succeeding at graduate education is an outstanding achievement.
Unless stated otherwise stated each major or minor project, explained in your individual course "Schedule of Assessments," will be accompanied by a Grading Rubric (see below). This template, with its percentage weights, will be used by your professor to grade your submissions. In fact, it will be pasted on the front page of your assignments when you receive them back graded. Each assignment will have its own unique Grading Rubric. Sometimes it will carry all eight blue lines, other times less. Sometimes the Consulting or Critical Thinking Thread will weight more. Pay attention to these variations.
Grading Criteria |
Weight |
Assessment % |
Score |
Known content thread: |
25% |
100 |
25.00 |
Research Thread: |
15% |
100 |
15.00 |
Communicating thread: |
15% |
100 |
15.00 |
Critical Thinking Thread: |
15% |
100 |
15.00 |
Spiritual Formation Thread: |
10% |
100 |
10.00 |
Change/Global context thread: |
10% |
100 |
10.00 |
Consulting Thread: |
5% |
100 |
5.00 |
Training Thread: |
5% |
100 |
5.00 |
Late points |
-100% |
0 |
0.00 |
Resubmission points |
-100% |
0 |
0.00 |
Total: |
100 |
||
| Comments |
When you begin organizing to write your paper/presentation, study the Grading Rubric associated with it. As you outline your paper, and create its major and minor sections, consider where you will address these weights. For example, a "research thread" weighted at 15 percent, would signify you should either include a review of literature in your paper if written to a journal audience; or otherwise, if written as a consulting report, back up your recommendations for organizational change with citations to research. Research normally means self-selected material beyond your assigned readings.
This is a generic list of LMSF Threads used to build further detailed grading rubrics for each assignment. It defines the overall learning outcomes of the master program in terms of knowledge and generic skills.
LMSF Threads |
Known Content Thread: |
Research Thread: |
Communicating Thread: |
Critical Thinking Thread: |
Spiritual Formation Thread: |
Change/Global Context Thread: |
Consulting Thread: |
Training Thread: |
Submissions with Grading Rubrics will be returned, marked with a numeric grade.
±65%
"D" writing recites facts or repeats material by rote. Such presentations are perceived as weak and including shallow analyses. Often they retell events or state opinions that might be evident to any organizational participant.
±75%
"C" writing presents basic concepts, and expresses them in a person's own words. These might combine both penetrating inductive analyses of facts, and thoughtful deductions regarding implications for action if the author is probed by others. However, they typically initiate demonstrations of only one of these two modes of thought, or neither.
±85%
"B" writing relates learning to personal applications and the immediate environment. These might discuss an idea, but not act on it. Alternatively, they often end with what the author knew prior to the current effort. (Some call this "fighting prior battles.")
Sometimes this quality of writing thoroughly systematizes data or factual circumstances of analysis. It might recognize patterns to formulate a coherent "big picture" understanding, and summarize this insightfully into charts or graphs. Still, it can fail to follow through with supported conclusions of consequences or actionable recommendations.
At other times, this quality of writing quickly develops a unifying conceptual statement of the situation. It can devote considerable effort to articulating logical ramifications. Yet, often it fails to authenticate the author's presumptions with careful investigations and presentations of supportable evidence. As a result, these viewpoints tend to lack credibility or become inadvertently biased. Occasionally, they solve incorrect problems.
±95%
"A" writing applies learned concepts to a broad array of conditions and situations. They communicate comprehension of how to accomplish inter-disciplinary transfers of knowledge globally. They have creative original insights, and exercise visionary change leadership by anticipating future issues from available tendencies or other signs.
Making Good Arguments
Part of communicating at the Master level is making good arguments. In addition to writing according to Turabian, make it your aim through your program to improve your reasoning and writing ability.
By your third course, you should have worked through this required textbook that explains, not only how to do research, but how to organize it to make good arguments.
Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research . 2d ed. Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2003.
Be sure to buy this text as you start the MSF program and make a concerted effort to work through it, learning how to make good arguments. Booth, Colomb and Williams summarize: "In a research report, you make a claim, back it with reasons based evidence, acknowledge and respond to other views and sometimes explain your principles of reasoning" (2003, p. 114).
