Writing the parts of scientific reports

General

As soon as you have finished planning  and have written an outline, start writing first drafts of individual chapters or sections. Writing is a thinking aid. Do not wait too long but write as you go along with your project or research.

Be aware that the following sections do not follow the most usual sequence of writing the individual parts but are based on the order in which they appear in a report or thesis. Writing the abstract, for example, you will presumably postpone until the very end as it is the summary of the work done.

The aim of this chapter is to make novice writers aware and/or remind more experienced writers of the conventions usually followed within the academic community. Remember that you always write for a specific audience, with a specific purpose. Not only do you need to consider content aspects such as their knowledge about the subject or stylistic aspects but also your readers’ expectations of how such texts are usually organized.

Therefore each sub-chapter guides you through the

• purpose of a particular part, such as the introduction
• the overall structure of this part
• language aspects of each part

In addition, each section provides either examples and/ or additional activities.

Meta-language

Mauranen (1993, cited in Paltridge & Starfield, 2007, p.77) calls meta-text, text that ‘talks about the text’. This is text which guides the reader through the text.

Meta-text enables the reader to anticipate what will come in the text (e.g. next section or chapter), for example: ‘The chapter which follows will present the theoretical framework for the study (Paltridge & Starfield, 2007, p.78)’. At the end of long sections such text might summarize the contents of a chapter in overall terms, as in the following example:

The purpose of this chapter has been to test the findings of the first stage of the study as […] It has also presented an analysis of a number of specific-purpose texts as a demonstration of how the framework in Chapter 4 can be applied to provide an explanation of genre assignment (adapted from Paltridge & Starfield, 2007, p.78).

A link to the Academic Phrasebank is provided in each sub-chapter to help you guide your readers through your work by using meta-language, which is the language used by authors to ‘talk’ about their text such as ‘this section presents ...’