Slides to accompany Weathington, Cunningham

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Slides to accompany Weathington, Cunningham
Pittenger (2010), Chapter 5 Writing the
Research Report
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Objectives

• What Readers Appreciate in Good Writing
• Elements of APA Style
• Special Grammatical Issues
• Academic Integrity
• Parts of the Research Report
• Proofreading

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Readers Expectations

• Focus
• Writing has a purpose and clear boundaries
• Organization
• Writing follows a logical sequence
• Integration
• Writing conveys a complete story

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Elements of APA Style

• Strive for accuracy, brevity, and clarity
• Write for a specific audience
• Typically other scientists
• Use unbiased language
• e.g., sex- and race-neutral
• Integrate numbers and text carefully, following
  guidelines in the manual

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Special Grammatical Issues

• Use active voice whenever possible
• We designed this study to test
• Use past tense when referring to the work of
  other researchers and to your own results
• Be careful with your pronouns
• Study box 5.1 for commonly misused words

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Academic Integrity

• Based on you giving fair credit where credits
  due
• Whenever you state a fact or report someone
  elses findings you need to cite the origin of
  that information
• Academic dishonesty plagiarism
• Dont go there
• Review Box 5.2 and the APA manual for citation
  examples

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Parts of the Research Report

• Title page
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Method
• Results
• Discussion
• References

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Crafting the Introduction
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Method Section Subsections

• Participants
• Materials/Measures
• Procedure

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Results Section Issues

• Follow APA manual guidelines for reporting
  results of statistical tests
• Use tables and figures sparingly and when they
  are more efficient than displaying statistical
  information in the text

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Discussion Details
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Proofreading

• Do it seriously
• Computer spellchecker is NOT a substitute for
  actual proofreading
• Read it aloud to yourself and have someone else
  listen (if you can find someone)

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What is Next?

• instructor to provide details