Thinking Machines and Gadgets a New Project at the Academic Writing Centre

 

Thinking Machines and Gadgets a New Project at the Academic Writing Centre

Starting in September 2027, the AWC team hope to work closely with our colleagues in MakerSpace and student volunteers to design and produce several 3-D gadgets that help with thinking and organising ideas about essays and assignments.

These gadgets can be based on existing pedagogical theory or personal experience or a combination of the two. Gadgets will be designed with to help the user understand and take control over their writing and critical process. We hope that writers will enjoy physically engaging with some aspects of their work and, in turn, begin to see difficult writing tasks as a series of intriguing puzzles.  

At this stage, we would love more people to be involved in the project and we would love to hear from staff and students alike. If you have an idea and would like to talk it over, please tell us about it via this form: Thinking Machines:  Contribution and Collaboration Proposals  – Fill in form

Below are a several sketches and provisional Tinkercad models for a sense of what we’re doing.

Paragraph Cracker 

This is based on Adrian Wallbank’s point  that ‘the ideas and grammatical units contained within an ideal paragraph, like the essay as a whole, should resemble an upturned Christmas Cracker.’ Wallbank outlines this structure in his book Academic Writing and Dyslexia (2018), with a clear topic sentence at the outset leading into the main body of the argument (i.e. the midsection of the cracker), before broadening out to link into the next paragraph. The ‘crackers’ can even be linked together to illustrate how individual paragraphs relate to the overall thesis statement or research question while making their own point, and contribute to the momentum of the essay.  When students with dyslexia produce disjointed paragraphs, it often arises from difficulties with sequencing rather than the content itself, and these are the sort of challenges our gadgets are aimed at: common issues that may require a lateral solution.

 

The House of Writing

This design follows Helen Sword’s model of successful writing in her book Air & Light & Time and Space: How Successful Academics Write (2017). Successful writing is conceptualised as a house resting on four pillars: behavioural, artisanal, social, and emotional (BASE). The 3-D model features detachable pillars to illustrate how each is crucial to the overall structure; for example, a writer with a strong artisanal pillar may produce well-crafted work, but find themselves unhappy working in isolation and struggling to meet deadlines without a clear sense of purpose. It is not possible for such a writer to ‘brute force’ their way through these roadblocks by skill alone, and it is far more useful to consider the balance that must be maintained in order to produce consistent, quality work. Thus, the roof of the house will only balance on all four pillars. Sword’s model may not represent a specific challenge in the same manner as Wallbank’s, but it is a useful tool for looking at academic writing as a holistic process.  

 Writing Seesaw

This gadget aims to help students envisage    paragraph structure as a balancing act, that can only be achieved when the four main facets of paragraph structure are applied.

Block 1 is Topic Sentence: a strong topic sentence will clearly outline what the writer wants to convey in the rest of the paragraph.

·    Block 2 is Expansion: the writer must develop on the topic sentence by explaining how the argument supplements the overall thesis statement.

·    Block 3 is Reference: for this block, the writer must find and utilise relevant secondary sources to supplement the argument of the paragraph.

·    Block 4 is Critical Reflection: the writer must use their own critical thinking to reflect on the secondary sources, as well as what’s been written so far. They then must convey how the paragraph findings have reinforced or discredited the essay’s thesis statement. 

To balance the seesaw, all four blocks must be inserted into the holes. Each block must be inserted chronologically once the facet of paragraph structure has been completed.

 Merin’s Forest

This one is a physical representation of the ‘Merlin’s forest’ analogy found in Irina Ruppo’s book A Guide to Academic Writing: How to Tame Your Essay (2025). Essentially, this analogy advises breaking down a paragraph that’s not working, getting its gist, and reverse-summarising this gist into an improved paragraph. It is told in the context of an essay on Merlin and his woodland adventures, but this in itself is full of metaphorical potential. Each paragraph might be represented by a tree, which needs to be pruned of excess branches until its point is clear; it must also be strong enough to stand on its own, but share roots with its fellows, which is to say all paragraphs must continue to answer the given question, rather than treating it as a jumping-off point for unconnected ideas.

Once enough trees are in place, they are arranged in a ring to illustrate the need for ‘round answers’ in academic writing, discussed in the same chapter of Ruppo’s book. A circle is not the only way to arrange the trees. As noted in Sam Dragga and Gwendolyn Gong’s book Editing: The Design of Rhetoric (2018): texts can be line-shaped if progressing in a single direction without direction; circle-shaped if returning to the point at which they began; pyramid-shaped if expanding their perspective from the specific to the general braid-shaped if integrating multiple perspectives in a single discourse; and many more.

 

Contact: Thinking Machines:  Contribution and Collaboration Proposals  – Fill in form

Text by Thomas O’Connell, Conaill Muldoon, and Irina Ruppo

Contributors to the Project (AWC Team members): Tom Delany, Thomas O’Connell, Kristal Jericho, Ananya Rajoo, Grace Barnes, Michelle Moore-Temple, Conaill Muldoon, and Parisa Zangeneh