Low-Cost Single-Session Intervention in Reducing Depression and Anxiety in Adolescents

The assignment:

The key to successful writing is understanding your reader. In Assignment 1, we will focus on our audience: who is reading your work? What knowledge can you expect them to have as they read?

As Psychology majors, you have a great deal of knowledge that other members of the public do not have. In this assignment, you will practice conveying specialized information in an understandable way. You will take a published scientific paper from the primary literature and write it up for the general public, such as the readers of the New York Times’ “Science Times” section. Thus, you will take a paper written for a specialized audience and write about it so that an educated lay person will not only be able to understand it but will be interested enough in it to keep reading.

You did not have to (and in fact, should not) summarize every aspect of the article, but only those that are most important so that the major points of the article can be understood. Because this is the first paper, I will be providing you 4 papers to choose from for this assignment. These peer reviewed articles will be posted on Blackboard. You can also pick your own article if you want, but you must get it approved by me first by emailing a copy of article.

After you have chosen an article, read it carefully several times. Get a sense of the intervention the implemented: What problem were they trying to solve? What prior research did they draw to make their intervention? What was their population of interest? Did their sample properly represent this population? What were the elements of the intervention they implemented? How did they test if it “worked”? Did they use a randomized control trial (thus would be an experiment) or is this a correlational study? What were the results, did the intervention “work”? What conclusions do the authors draw from this study and do they have any suggestions for making the intervention better? What other children could benefit from this intervention?

After you feel like you understand the paper, both on a general and a part-by-part level, write a popular press article as a piece for the general public (someone who is interested in psychology but doesn’t have any background in it). You will incorporate the points you winnowed from the article in the above step but change the tone of the writing so that it is less formal and does not contain specialized terms or statistics. You might think of writing as if your parent or someone else who is reasonably intelligent but not necessarily versed in psychology were going to read it. Aim for 2-3 pages, double- spaced, for your first draft (final draft must reach at least 2 pages) 

Specific writing goals:

Pay particular attention to the following:

• Remember your audience. Aim for an intelligent layperson, such as someone who might pick up the New York Times or another good newspaper. Don’t assume that your reader has any specialized knowledge of your field. It may help to visualize someone you know that has not had any training in psychology (family members? friends?).
• Engage the reader right from the beginning with a strong hook so that they will continue to read your article.
• Use an appropriate tone throughout the piece. Think about the tone of the scientific article and the audience it is trying to reach. How can this information be made more appetizing and exciting to someone reading a pop-science piece?
  • Pay particular attention to vocabulary. Will your reader know the jargon or acronyms common in your field? Do you NEED to use that jargon or those acronyms, or can you find another way to say it that is still accurate?
  • Remember that you do not have to summarize every bit of information in your article. What are the main points? Try to give the reader a good sense of the study that you are describing without drowning him or her in unnecessary detail.
    • Work on flow from section to section.