Review of Undergraduate writing in psychology: Learning to tell the scientific story.

Reviews the book, Undergraduate writing in psychology: Learning to tell the scientific story by R. Eric Landrum (see record 2008-03689-000). This review is written from the perspective of a student who enrolled in a course on academic writing and a professor who taught the course. From the student's perspective, Landrum covers all the bases, from the reason psychologists write scientifically to the proper way to write a notecard. However, she feels that the book is too basic, and that students will not feel that they learned anything new from it. From the professor's perspective, the book covers the basics of writing empirical papers and review papers in APA style. However, the book's difficulty level is very low, which may say a lot about the audience for psychology textbooks. The dilemma for Landrum is to decide which audience to write for: The best students don't need the book's basic points, and the worst students won't read it. Landrum's book may be the best of the APA Paper books: It's more original and more effective than its competitors. Storytelling is a good model for research articles, and Landrum nicely develops the model throughout the book. Despite its storytelling theme, however, the book recommends hiding the storyteller: students should sound objective, formal, and detached--in a word, boring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)