Tutoring Across Disciplines

I have previously worked with writers of scientific papers and am currently working in the WC Enrollment Program with a PhD student in the music therapy department. Her papers and presentations are an interesting mix of both empirical research on the effectiveness and practices of music therapy and case studies / personal anecdotes of actually practicing it. At the same time, the student is sometimes worried that a true "research paper" shouldn't necessarily incorporate stories about actual humans (not even officially researched case studies); on the contrary, I encourage her to use these stories to explain/balance the research, as long as she does so professionally.

Like we once talked about in class, the best academics are people who know how to seamlessly integrate rigorous abstract ideas / thoughts with concrete, intriguing storytelling--except burgeoning academics feel they must be overly formal and reliant on a stripped academic tone (the student is also an international student from Korea so she may feel even more like she has to do things "properly"). I wonder though about the different standards professors may have--maybe some professors actually do want research papers to be purely research/abstracted?

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