Getting Started With Your Report

Understanding the Sections of Your Report

Title page

Abstract

Table of contents

Introduction

Body

Theories, Models, and Hypotheses

Materials and
methods

Results: presenting data

Results:
interpreting data

Conclusions

Recommendations

References

Appendices

General Technical Writing Guidelines

Works Cited

Results: Presenting data

In the results section of your report, you will finally get to talk about what you discovered, invented, or confirmed through your research, and you will present your experimental data, observations, and outcome. Because this section focuses on your specific research project, the results section is the most straightforward of the sections to write, and it may be the simplest and most enjoyable section you will write. Regardless of what other sections you need to include, you will always write a section in which you present results, although it might be called discussion rather than “results,” All preceding sections of the report (Introduction, Materials and Methods, etc.) lead in to the Results section of the report and all subsequent sections will consider what the results mean (conclusion, recommendations, etc.).

Focus on the facts of your research in the Results section and present them in a straightforward way. Consider how best to organize your results section in the clearest and most logical way. The most common way to organize information in a research report is chronologically. This method of organization allows you to present information in the sequence that events occurred. Organizing information chronologically can be very simple and will not require much preplanning. It does tend to give emphasis to each event regardless of its relative importance, however and, as a result, can be difficult for readers to understand which event or what information is most important, and it can also be difficult for the writer to keep their reader’s attention. Blicq and Moretto provide the following exercise to demonstrate this tendency of chronological organization. Can you identify what is most important from the list of events from an astronaut’s day?

Astronauts were wakened at 7:15; breakfasted at 7:55, sighted the second stage of the rocket at 9:23, carried out metabolism tests from 9:40 to 10:50, extinguished cabin fire at 11:02, passed directly over Houston at 11:43 . . . (taken from Blicq and Moretto 168).

Another good way to help organize information so that readers will understand what is most important is in a figure or table.

How should I incorporate figures and tables into my report?

Most scientific reports will use some type of figure and/or table to convey information to readers. Figures visually represent data and include graphs, charts, photographs, and illustrations. Tables organize data into groups. You will most likely use figures and tables in your report to represent numerical data from measurements taken during your experiment. Figures and tables should help to simplify information, so you should consider using them when words are not able to convey information as efficiently as a visual aid would be able to. For instance, if you have to subject numerical data to computer analysis, it will be easier and more concise to represent this visually than it would be through words. Consider using figures and tables when you need to decipher information or the analysis of information, when you need to describe relationships among data that are not apparent otherwise, and when you need to communicate purely visual aspects of a phenomenon or apparatus.

In some cases, you will not have to make a decision about what kind of table or figure you will use. Such is the case when you need to include a photograph in your report, for instance. In other cases, you may have trouble deciding what kind of table or figure would work best in your report. Readers will expect to see certain kinds of information presented in certain kinds of ways, and you can use reader expectations to your advantage. David Porush outlines the purposes that different kinds of tables and figures serve best and most often. It is important to choose the correct way to represent your data; if you understand what your audience expects from each one, you will be prepared to choose the best way to represent data.

• Tables or lists are simple ways to organize the precise data points themselves in one-on-one relationships.
• A graph is best at showing the trend or relationship between two dimensions, or the distribution of data points in a certain dimension (i.e., time, space, across studies, statistically).
  
• A pie chart is best at showing the relative areas, volumes, or amounts into which a whole (100%) has been divided.
• Flow charts show the organization or relationships between discrete parts of a system. For that reason they are often used in computer programming.
• Photographs are not very good at calling attention to a particular part within a larger structure. They are best at presenting overall shapes, shades, and relative positionings, or when a ‘real-life’ picture is necessary, as in the picture of a medical condition or an electron micrograph of a particular microscopic structure.
• Illustrations are best when they are simple, unshaded line drawings. Remove all but the essential details in order to keep your line drawing as uncluttered as possible. They suit most purposes for representing real objects or the relationship of parts in a larger object. (Porush 141).

When you include tables and figures in your report it is important that you pay attention to some general guidelines for using them as well. These guidelines can help you decide when to include a table or figure and they will also help you to meet your audience’s expectations so that they will understand what is most important from your text and from tables and figures. The most important general rule is that tables and figures should supplement rather than simply repeat information in the report. You should never include a table or figure simply to include them. This is redundant and wastes your reader’s time.

Additionally, all tables and figures should:

• be self-contained—they should make complete sense on their own without reference to the text
• be cited in the text—it will be very confusing to your audience to suddenly come upon a table or figure that is not introduced somewhere in the text. They will not have a context for understanding its relevance to your report.
• include a number such as Table 1 or Figure 10—this will help you to distinguish multiple tables and figures from each other.
  
• include a concise title—it is a good idea to make the most important feature of the data the title of the figure
• include clear and proportionate labels so that readers will understand your table or figure

Sample Results Section

Like the sample “Materials and Method” section, the following “Results” section was taken from a student lab report. Notice that most of the results are presented in a figure and a table.

Table 1 shows the regression equations used to calibrate the myograph data. A two-point calibration was used for the ECG recordings. The values presented in the following graphs all make use of the calibrated data.