Tip Thursday: What to Do with Subjective Questions

Not all questions are quite this... objective.

As many of you have noticed, some textbooks ask some pretty subjective questions. For instance, a business communications text might ask you to create an email or an ethics book might ask your opinion on an ethical issue. Even a math book may ask a question that involves you thinking more deeply and critically. Per our post on the topic, yes, some of these problems are unsolvable. But not ALL of them are unsolvable. Let's clear up the distinction between a solvable opinion-based question and an unsolvable one.

What is unsolvable:
A problem is unsovable if it is not only personal, but asks you to...
a) work in a group
b) look up OUTSIDE SOURCES
c) refer to other resources to answer it
d) refer to the textbook and use their content in some highly specific way (see below)

This is an example of an unsolvable question:

"Convert Table 2.2 on page 41 to presentation slides so that the content is easily readable in a large conference room. Decide whether to use free-form or structured slides and decide how much content will be on the slides and how much will be spoken by the presenter. Provide speaker's notes along with your slides."

You can't solve this because it asks you to convert something directly from the book. Now, it would be possible to solve this if you just had to talk generally about how to split up the content and how to present the slides. Then you could talk more generally.

Pretty much everything else is solvable.

What is solvable: 
You'd be surprised how many of these types of questions we consider to be solvable. Think about the question from the student's perspective. If you needed help on this problem, what kind of help would you seek out? You likely wouldn't want to read someone else's opinion or a cut-and-dry answer. That wouldn't help one bit. Rather, you'd want to read what types of things to consider, what key ideas to include, and what a proper conclusive answer might look like. You can certainly offer an example of a personal opinion as well.

So a question is still solvable even if it asks for you to think about a concept in-depth (i.e. "What do ethics mean in the context of XYZ" or "What do you think is the appropriate response to an ethical dilemma?").

Some examples of solutions that are solvable and how the authors approached them in a few different disciplines. If you have examples of your own you'd like to share, please send them to me via email! I'd love to share them with the group.

Sample Subjective Question - Business 2

Business Sample - Ethics

MathType Tips: How to Remove Italics

Just a quick Thursday tip for all of your writers who use MathType, which I happen to know is most of you...

You may have noticed that we often tell you not to italicize units in MathType or we ask you kindly to add a space between the unit and the value, but maybe you're not sure how to un-italicize them because you're stuck in "Math" mode. Well, here's how to easily fix that issue. No more italicized units or weird formatting problems.

Italicized units look like this screenshot, and you'll confuse students if you randomly italicize something like "feet", "meters", or "inches" for no good reason.

 To fix this, just double-click on the Mathtype and the editing box will open. Then highlight the right side of the equation (you want that L' variable to remain italicized, so leave that little guy alone). From there, go to "Style". You'll see that "Math" is selected by default. This automatically assumes you're typing equations so it will italicize everything and will not allow you to input spaces at all. Instead, click "Text" style.

Voila! This screenshot below is exactly what you want to see:

Then when you exit out of the box, make sure to hit "Save". Your answer will now look proper and lovely and have the correct italics or non-italics. 

Now, on to the next solution... 

How To Create a Template in Word (.dot)

Happy Friday! We're bringing you another helpful tip on authoring today to close out the week.

This week's tip is a HUGE time-saver. We're teaching you how to create templates in Word. Do this now and save yourself hours and hours of boring formatting work over the long run! That means more solutions written, more productivity, and more money for you. That's good all around.

Now, let's get started. We'll go over what a template is, how to create one, and how to save it. If you have further questions, ask them here on the blog or on the LinkedIn group.

What is a template?
A template is a document that saves all of its formatting (fonts, delimiters, margins, page size, headers) so you can easily duplicate your solution format again and again. Imagine all the tedious time saved! A template saves in a .dot format, so make sure that when you finish each solution and save it, you change the name and convert this to .docx. More on that in the final part of this tutorial.

How do I create a template?
It's super easy. For our purposes, you can actually use our template document that we send you when you start a project, and then just go to File>Save As>Word Template. Alternatively, create your own template for certain types of solutions (i.e. maybe you have a lot of similar discussion questions or accounting questions with similar tables). Now, each time you open that file, it will preserve all formatting so you can start fresh with each new solution. Voila!

How do I save each solution?
Now, you know you'll need to change certain things in each file, like the chapter ID and problem ID, possibly the date (unless you also make that update automatically too, smart idea.). Then you're all done writing the solution. You can't simply hit Ctrl+S. You'll need to go to the file menu and Save As. Just hit .docx, update the file name to reflect your BookID-ChapID-ProbID, and then you're all set.

It's as easy as that. Imagine how much time that will save you in the long run if you set that up now. In solutions authoring, time really is the same thing as money, so we recommend you do this today!

For more information on this, check out Microsoft's tutorial on their website. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

How To Box Your Answers in Word

Many of you have asked me or Ryan how you go about boxing answers in Word without MathType. In MathType, it's simple. You just highlight the text you need, and you click the box option, like so:

But if you don't use MathType (because you use Word's Equation Editor 3.0 or because your text isn't equation-oriented), there is another option for you in Microsoft Word. To box the answer, you just highlight the final answer and click “Outside Borders” in the Paragraph menu.You should not box with a text box. This is way easier anyway, so I'm not so sure why you'd even want to! :-)