Research Skills

Finally, you write up your project report. It is important to recognise that this will go through several drafts. You can't just sit down and write a report on this sort of scale quickly and easily. You should have gathered far too much material for that. And it may take you a little while really to get into the writing.

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Towards the end of the research phase, as you face up to all the writing you'll need to do, you may reach a state where nothing seems to be going on. The interesting planning and discovery stages are behind you and you may start to worry that your research findings aren't good enough. But push on. Once you are fully engaged in writing you will rediscover your enthusiasm. Talking about your work with other students, teachers and friends helps every stage, and especially now when you are really having to sort things out in your mind.

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Try to achieve different things at each draft stage:

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First Draft

For the first full draft aim just to get everything down on paper, even if you are dissatisfied with parts of it as you write. Writing a project report can involve a lot more than producing a description of your work. You may have to:

• explain the rationale for what you have done, outlining the background from which your question arose so that your readers can see it's significance;
• explain your choice of research methods; and
• plot a coherent line of argument for your report that takes you towards your conclusions, explaining yourself clearly and justifying your judgements.

So it is quite enough just to get things down somehow at this first stage.

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Second Draft

As you work towards the second draft you can go back over the parts of the report you're not quite happy with. Concentrate on the structure of your argument, making sure the ideas are adequately linked and sections follow on one from the other towards your conclusions.

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Third Draft

Now reorganise and reduce your word count until it is closer to the required length (you'll find tips for this in the next subsection).

Remember that you should be using appropriate research material and evidence, either as quotations, statistics or paraphrased information. To avoid plagiarism, use footnotes to clearly acknowledge the work that is not your own.

For a very long project, you may want to use subheadings or chapters to separate different sections of your argument.

Finally, you will need to check that the meaning of each sentence is clear and polish up the report. 

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If you are using a word-processor, these draft stages may be more fluid. But it is still very important not to try to do everything at once, so it is worth behaving as if you were producing several separate drafts, and going through your work with the above different aims in mind.

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This page was adapted from: Chambers, E. & Northedge, A. The Arts Good Study Guide, (1997) The Open University, Chapter 6, p. 229-230