Welcome to this ELC self-study video. Today, we're going to take a look at the Findings
section of an academic report. Here, we tell the reader exactly what we've
found. So, we've got our information in front of
us; what can we learn from it? Remember what we wrote in our introduction.
Our introduction laid out a clear direction for our report, and now we just have to follow
it. First, which part of the data do we need to
look at? We need to think about where the important
relationships are in the data. For example, if we want to find out about
'recycling attitudes and behaviour', we would need to look at which factors seem to affect
these two things. It might be things like how aware people are
of the consequences of recycling, what are their moral opinions towards recycling, or
simply how convenient is recycling. Now, how are we going to structure the Findings?
One way would be to describe and then to discuss each finding, one-by-one.
However, we could also describe all the findings together, and then have a discussion.
Structure one is generally better for shorter reports, while structure two is good for longer
reports. Now, let's look at how to set out the Findings.
First thing to do is to explain to the audience which part of the data we'll be looking at.
It's very useful to include tables and charts to display information more clearly and effectively.
You use these, as well as the wording in your report, to describe the data to your reader.
Now that we've got our data, and our audience is focused, we can begin to discuss what we've
found. What does the data tell us about our topic?
What are the possible problems with the data? What are the implications of our data?
Remember to use subheadings, to number them, and to underline them to make your report
easier to read. Now, there are a few tricks to make our writing
more interesting. We should use approximations in our Findings.
For example, we can say "roughly one third" instead of "thirty-two per cent".
This will also make our discussion of the data easier to understand, and make sure our
audience doesn't misunderstand us. We also need to be careful about sounding
too certain. It's good to sound like we know what we're
talking about, but in the real world, we can never be one-hundred per cent sure.
It's usually a good idea, in academic writing, to "hedge" a little.
"Hedging" just means giving ourselves a little room to be wrong.
So, for example, we could say "it will rain tomorrow", or we can say "it may rain tomorrow".
It's almost impossible to know whether it will rain tomorrow or not, so it's always
a good idea to show our readers that we know we could be wrong.
As another example, instead of saying "students who understand the consequences of recycling
are more likely to recycle", we could hedge by saying "students who understand the consequences
of recycling may be more likely to recycle". Another thing we should do to make sure our
report is correct is to use authoritative references.
References are a good way to show that we've done some research, and that some experts
agree with our point. There are other ELC videos which show how
to reference effectively. OK, so, now we've got all the parts together
for our Findings section. If anything is unclear, just go through the
video again. If it's still unclear, check with the teachers
in the CILL.