Writing process
1 Planning your work
General
The planning stage is vital for the quality of your writing project and should be approached in a systematic way.
Understand the assignment
One of the first hurdles you need to overcome before you actually start writing is to make sure that you have understood the assignment. What exactly are you asked to do?
Make sure you know from the start the practicalities:
- Is there a minimal/ maximal length?
- When is the hand-in date (deadline)?
- How many copies must I submit?
- How must I submit the work (electronically or as one or more hard copies)?
- What are the assessment criteria?
Choose “A piece of the pie”
Even if the broad topic of a written assignment, a seminar paper or project report or a bachelor thesis was prescribed, you first task is find a detailed perspective that you wish to pursue. To achieve some depth in your research and your writing you need to focus attention on a narrower “topic” so that you can use examples and details rather than just general (superficial) statements. The difference between ineffective and effective academic writing is often the difference between general statements and specific details.
Finding a research question
Narrowing down the topic is necessary to find a focus and a research question. Finding a question you want to answer is often the most critical part of a project. This can be done by asking the Five Whs:
- Who?
- What?
- Where?
- When?
- How? (in some cases)
Example 1
Imagine you want to write a report on 
bottled water. How could you go from this topic to find a research question?
- Who: consumers
- What: environmental impact
- Where: disposal sites
- When: no time frame
Research question could be: What is the environmental impact of the disposal of plastic water bottles?
This process of narrowing down the topic goes hand in hand with research to develop a working knowledge about the topic, its scope, related issues, questions other researchers have investigated. For more go to
Aims & objectives in engineering reports
Students of engineering are often provided with a task or project. Their first task is to narrow down the focus by formulating an aim and objectives. The starting point can be a research question from which you must define an overall aim and measurable objectives.
The aim is what you intend to achieve with the project; it is the reason why you conduct your research and where you hope to be at the end. Aims should be single and have a focus.
When writing about your aim, you usually use an infinitive, such as to compare, to investigate, to verify, or to measure. Example:
The objectives then are steps towards this aim. They are specific statements and measurable outcomes. They are often formatted as a list, with or without numbers. For the GPS example two objectives could be:
Objectives should be SMART, which means they should be:
Writing in a team
During your studies – but maybe also in your professional lives – you might have to write a report or paper as a team. Different team members often take different roles. Sometimes one team member drafts the whole paper and the others review and revise it. At other times, writing parts are allocated to different team members and at the end the parts are connected to one text, reviewed and revised by everybody or again one team member. Whatever the case, clarify beforehand who will do what, set a timetable, consider software to ease collaboration, such as sharing drafts on Dropbox, or using Google Docs (Gastel & Day, 2017).