Writting Sample Concerns

[Kwest]

I'm going through my first round of applications and I'm getting all my stuff together. I'm worried about my writing sample for various reasons. While in my undergraduate ling program I never did a research project or thesis. I did a couple annotated bibliographies, but that hardly seems ideal. Right now I'm planning on submitting a paper I did for speech science about two experiments.

In the first experiment I compared acoustic variations between the tense vowels [i,e,u] and their lax counterparts. In the second experiment I looked at duration variation in stressed and non-stressed syllables. The paper, as is, details the experiment methods, findings and conclusion...but it isn't...ground breaking, original or unique since it is mostly replication of other studies. It's also pretty short at 6 pages.

In order to beef it up, I'm considering tacking on a third part which will tie in the acoustic findings of the first two experiments with a new perception task in a third proposed experiment. Here I will detail subjects, goals, hypothesis, methods, possible outcomes and the benefits of doing such an experiment. Bear in mind that I only have a ghost of an idea for this third proposal. My other option is to simply write something new...which I 'kind of' have time for if I apply for spring instead of fall. Would it be best to go with my first option or to just write something new? Also, if I go with my first option, upon it's completion would anyone like to read and review it for me? It's been kind of Frankensteined...lol

[fuzzylogician]

I don't know of any ling programs that have spring admissions but regardless, as a start, it sounds like improving on your existing paper makes more sense than writing a new paper. From your description, the main thing you should add to the paper is a discussion of the implications of your findings in Experiments 1-2 on [insert phonetic/phonological concept or theory here]. Even if you're not exactly reinventing the wheel, show that you understand what the theory is, why the experiments were designed and implemented the way they were, and what they show. Do the same for your proposed Experiment 3: explain why you are proposing it - what part of the theory it would test, and how; what kind of predictions you can make given certain reasonable assumptions about participants' behavior, and how possible outcomes would constrain the space of logical possibilities of constructing a more accurate theory of [thing].

If you don't think that you can do all that then maybe you should consider selecting a new topic and writing a new paper where you could discuss something more than just a close reading or summary of other people's ideas with no contribution of your own. But as a first step, trying to improve on the existing paper sounds like the better option to me.

Edited September 14, 2011 by fuzzylogician