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After reading this article you will learn about the aspects relating to the study of a research report.
The obvious criteria for good reporting are accuracy and clarity. Making the research report interesting and writing with flair and ‘style’ is a subsidiary virtue. Accuracy and clarity must be the principle goals.
It greatly helps to work from an outline. The standardized format detailed above will, of course, go a long way towards organizing the research report but a researcher will more probably produce a more coherent report without wasting much time and energy in frequent rewriting if he first organized his main findings.
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The researcher would do well to check the logic of the sequence of presentation and carefully examine it for any omission of consequence. It is often helpful to start penning the results section first. It is also useful to maintain a constant correspondence between the introduction section and the one devoted to final discussion, to maintain a smooth conceptual narration.
It is important that even a non-professional should be able to comprehend on reading the report what the researcher did and for what reason, despite his non-conversance with statistic, complex manipulative study designs or the substantive area of the research problem. Hence, reporting should involve minimum of jargon and use of non-intelligible examples of concepts.
Advisedly, the reporter should read and re-read his own writing taking the role of an intelligent but non-professional reader. He should at each point, feel called upon to ask himself whether he has himself understood the concept he is trying to employ in his report, whether it is unambiguous and so forth.
It is a difficult feat to take the role of a non-professional, naive reader, yet it is an overriding requirement in report writing. It may be very helpful to have someone else (friends and reviewers, especially those unfamiliar with the subject-matter area) read the draft and comment upon it.
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If they find something unclear, their observation needs to be respected. As un-clarity detectors, the readers are generally never wrong. The chances of producing a good draft in first writing are small indeed. Good reporting requires a great measures of compulsiveness in attention to details.
Since the purpose of a research report is to convey information rather than to achieve a literary goal, the reporter can avoid wastage of time by writing the first draft as quickly as possible.
Once they are there on paper, he can go back and rewrite the sentences and paragraphs. Rewriting often implies restructuring involves a thorough recasting of the research report, even going back to do more data-analysis in support of an argument the researcher is presenting.
A few decades ago, it was conventional to employ third person passive voice in a scientific reporting. This happily, is no longer the norm and the report-writer is free to use the first person and resort to the active voice.
The research-reporter may refer to himself as I or we (if there are two or more). It should be noted here, that constant use of ‘I’ or ‘We’ may distract the reader from the subject matter. Hence, it is advisable to employ the ‘first person’ sparingly. Frequent solicitations directed at the ‘readers’ are also undesirable.
Is the use of past tense more desirable as compared to the use of the present tense? The answer to the question can only be that both have their pride of place in reporting.
The past tense should be used while reporting the previous findings tabled by others and while reporting how the re-searcher conducted his study (e.g., the groups were measured before the introduction of the experimental variable) and the specific past behaviours of the respondents covered by the study.
The present tense is better used for results that are before the reader and for conclusions of a generic nature (like, thus the parental incomes determine the aspirations of children about incomes from jobs).
It is evident that language can perpetuate stereo-typical notions, hence the reporter is expected to avoid writing in a fashion that reinforces questionable attitudes and assumptions about different communities of people as also the sex roles.
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Many a time, the use of masculine norms and pronouns are used to refer to both sexes. Such usage like the generic term ‘man’ intending to connote both men and women is misleading. Researches show that readers visualize and think of male persons when such forms are used. Sadly, language has not caught up with this new awareness. Alternatives too are not totally satisfactory.
In most contexts, the simplest alternative is to use the plural like persons or individuals. The reporter must be accurate in his use of pronouns when he is describing his own research or those of others. Readers need to be informed about the sex of the interviewers, observers, experimenters and participants. It is improper to omit or conceal their sex-identity.
Knowledge of sex is quite often crucial. Certain words or terms have a gender-slant, for example; ‘manning the project’ or ‘husbanding resources.’ Such terms are better avoided.
It should be noted that the use of certain adjectives betrays a bias when their use denotes not different behaviours on the part of men and women but the customary social biases current in evaluating. Some verbs also carry latent bias and inadvertently reveal a stereo-type.
It is important that the reporter meticulously avoids sex-role stereo-typing when selecting examples about the sex of home-makers, nurses, doctors, school teachers and so on. The research report should not inflict injuries upon the sensible modern view that women’s vital needs are similar to men’s.