Manifest your scholarship with these 24 writing recipes - A pedagogical perspective

You can become a scholar in just “24” months if you follow the “24 writing recipes,” prepared by Isaac Ato Mensah.

This is possible when you do the work in the book titled “Manifest Your Scholarship with these 24 Writing Recipes,” authored by Isaac Ato Mensah, with additional material supplied by yours truly.

But there is a proviso: you have to “read, read, read, and read,” says Isaac Ato Mensah, referencing his mentor.

The main author reminds the reader that scholarly and academic writing are the same because they have invariably the same substance/content. The book reminds readers that celebrated author Jane Austen, for example, had only basic education, which focused on “French, needlework, and dance.”. Yet, her writings are studied “at the PhD level”.

Contrary to wrongly held notions, writing can be done by people from all walks of life, and yes, “an engineer can also write.”

The book comprises 24 chapters or “recipes.”

These recipes include model reflective essays, journalistic writings, PhD synopses, motivational and personal statements, and content analysis. The book talks about how to reference your work but does not completely tell you how to do it.

You, the reader, will have to use the “current” American Psychological Association (APA) referencing style to complete the reference list. In this edition, the authors use the “APA 7th Edition Referencing Style”. This method of teaching is called the constructivist teaching model. The constructivist model is a method of teaching whereby the student is the one who builds or constructs their knowledge.

The teacher/instructor—in this case, the main author—is a guide; he plays the role of a learning facilitator.

Each chapter has learning objectives, key points, and or a summary. The summary of every topic, recipe, or chapter has been done in about three to five bullet points.

The constructivist teaching model used in the book is based partially on Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development.

Jean Piaget, a cognitive psychologist, was of the view that children and learners build on their previous knowledge.

Such previous knowledge, which Piaget called "schema,” is updated as the person learns new concepts.

If I’m reading Piaget right, then you, the novice writer, definitely have some idea or schema about how to write, don’t you?

Your idea is also known as relevant previous knowledge—an important factor for

teaching and learning to take place. In the same vein, you will learn a new/additional skill with each topic, chapter, or recipe you attempt to cook.

But there is no denying the fact that you must “read, read, read, and read” and also practice cooking the recipes daily. Writing is a hard skill that can be taught and learned, just like cooking. To acquire those skills, you can use the 10,000-hour rule, as popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, as a useful guide.

But you don’t need to go through at least 10 years of mentorship, as the main author did.

In “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell referenced the research work by Ericsson et al. (1993), who suggested that to gain mastery of particular skills, such as playing the violin, you need “deliberate practice” for about 10 years or 10,000 hours.

Long story short, Gladwell was inferring that one hour spent a day learning a skill for ten years can make you an expert in that skill.

It is my considered opinion that with scalability, you can learn the 24 recipes in two years, that is, 24 months—each month for one recipe.

What is scalability?

Consider this analogy.

If you were a foreign student and needed to travel from the Winneba campus to the Ajumako campus of the University of Education Winneba, you’d probably need a map, right?

A good map will give you a scale of the actual distance.

For example, 1:100000 means one centimetre is equivalent to 100000 centimetres (that is, one kilometre).

The scale factor or scalability approach I have suggested here means that you can also reduce the 10 years required to master writing skills to 24 months—one month for each recipe.

Reducing 10 years to two years (24 months) means you have used a scale of 1:5.

That's one-fifth of 10 years.

So yes, in 24 months, it’s possible that you can complete every task in the book. And yes, you’ll definitely learn the hard skill of writing.