Report writing
Writing an essay, dissertation, thesis or report on a technical subject is about being able to order facts, present ideas and formulate arguments. Practice provides experience in how to get ideas, facts, pros and cons, results, conclusions and recommendations across.
Here are a few tips to help you:
- Essays and reports need to be your own work - avoid plagiarism and always acknowledge other people’s work and references (note that software programs now exist that can detect if it is likely that work has been copied and reproduced from the Internet)
- Think about who you are writing for, who will read it, who needs it, what will they want to gain from it, and what are their terms of reference?
- Think about the style including punctuation, grammar and spelling. Write clearly and concisely and do not be ambiguous. Do not over explain. Never refer to yourself, always use the third person and write in the past tense.
- Reports often will need several edits and modifications before they are right. Set aside time to put your work to one side for a while and re-read it with fresh eyes.
- Plan your work before you start writing; this will make it much easier and save you time in the long run.
- Title page
- Abstract (summary)
- Acknowledgements
- Contents list
- Introduction
- Literature review
- Materials and methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusions and recommendations
- Bibliography and references
- Glossary
- Appendices
A plan could have the following structure (a complete plan with detailed explanations of what should appear in each section is available to download here): 