Elaborating in an academic discussion. It's a piece of cake. Elaborate means to add more. When you elaborate in a discussion, you add more details to your answer. Let's start learning more about elaboration with an analogy. Do you know what a potluck is? It's a party where everyone brings their own dish then you share all the food that everyone brought. This is a very popular kind of party in America. Imagine that you're going to a potluck and you take a cake to share. Would you take A, a flat cake or B, a layer cake? I guess it depends on a preferences of your friends, but my friends would much rather have a cake with different layers and fruit and whip cream. For us, this flat cake is skimpy. Skimpy means not enough. The layer cake however, would be generous, big enough to help you feel satisfied. I would feel embarrassed to take that skimpy cake to the party. Instead, I'd want to share a cake that other people would be excited about and would want to actually eat. In a discussion, you bring your ideas and opinions to the table, just as you would take a cake to a potluck. You want your contributions to be generous not skimpy. The way to be generous in a conversion is to elaborate, or add more to you your answers. You want to fill in all the details and give your listeners enough information to understand what you mean and to have plenty to respond to. How can you know if you're bringing a detailed response or an insufficient response to a conversation? Well, you can be aware of the characteristics of comments that lack collaboration. There are many reasons why a discussion comment may lack elaboration. Here are just a few common ones. Insufficiently elaborated responses can be too short, they can be vague or not specific, or they can just be a repetition of what you've already said. Let's look at responses that are too short. In a discussion on GMOs, genetically modified organisms, a skimpy comment could be, well, I think we need GMOs. This person does not explain his answer. Why do we need GMOs? What are their reasons? How are they beneficial? The other people in this conversation would not be convinced. Maybe he has a good point in mind, but he hasn't explained or elaborated enough to convince us. Too short comments are like this cake, they don't bring much to the table. Another type of insufficiently elaborated comment is the vague comment. Well, I think GMOs are an important aspect of modern life that can be found anywhere at any time. This guy is using a lot of words, but the words don't really mean anything, they're not specific. The other conversation partners would have nothing of substance to respond to. It's like giving your friend only the whipped cream that goes in the middle of the cake without actually giving them any cake at all. Other insufficient comments are repetitive. The speaker may repeat what he or she has already said. GMOs will be an important food source when our population grows. The world's population grows every year, and GMOs will provide us with enough food. This comments repeats the same point twice, just in different words. This is called paraphrasing. And paraphrasing is not elaborating. You'll bore the other people you're talking to. It's kind of like taking a bunch of identical cakes to a party. What's the point of that? In a conversation you have two jobs when it comes to elaboration. The first job is to elaborate on your own responses. You need to support and explain your ideas. You could do this with facts, like statistics or examples from a text. Anecdotes, those are stories. Analogies, which are comparisons between two things. And hypotheticals are imagined examples. You want to explain your ideas well so that people will clearly understand what it is you're trying to communicate. In the next video you'll learn more about using these different types of elaboration. Your second job in a conversation is to ask your partners to elaborate on their answers, especially if they've offer a response that is short, vague or repetitive. You can do this through asking the right kinds of questions. You could try asking, what do you mean by? Or, can you be more specific? Or, I'd love to hear more about. You'll learn other ways to ask for elaboration elsewhere in this module. One last thing you should remember about elaboration, don't elaborate too much. If you start to elaborate too much, you run the risk of taking over the conversation. Or of making your response a disorganized mess much like this cake. Know how to use just the right amount of elaboration and you'll satisfy your conversation partners. In the next videos you'll learn more about how to offer just the right amount of elaboration.
