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Writing Experimental Reports
Good morning, everyone,
    Today we’ll discuss some preliminaries concerning how to write experimental reports. When you first signed up for a course in university like a psychology course, chances are that you didn’t really expect what was coming in your study, particularly the course emphasizes on methodology and statistics. For a few of you this may have come as a pleasant surprise, provided that you have already known something about the course. For most, however, I dare say, it will undoubtedly have been a shock to the system. No doubt in other parts of your course study, you will read books and journals, examining critically models and theories, assumptions and hypothesis put forward by scholars and specialists.
    My task today is to help you understand some of the important features of experimental reports, because you will have to write up some kind of report of this nature if your course gives prominence to practical work, especially experimenting.
    Then, what is an experimental report? All a report is...really...is the place in which you tell the story of your study; like what you did, why you did it, what you found out in the process, and so on. In doing this you are more like an ancient storyteller, whose stories were structured in accordance with widely recognized and long-established conventions, than a modern novelist who is free to dictate form as well as content. Moreover, like the storyteller of old, although you will invariably be telling your story to someone who knows quite a bit about it already, you are expected to present it, as if it had never been heard before. This means that you will need to spell out the details and assume little knowledge of the area on the part of your audience.
    Then perhaps you may ask: what is the nature of the conventions governing the report. A clue I think can be found in this basic structure. A highly-structured and disciplined report is written in sections and the sections by and large follow an established sequence. What this means is that, in the telling, your story is to be cut up into chunks: different parts of the story are to appear in different places in the report. What you did and why you did it appear in the section called "introduction". How you did it is in "the method" section and what you found out is in "the result" section. And finally what you think it shows appear in "the discussion" part. As you can see, the report, therefore, is a formal document composed of series of sections in which specific information is expected to appear.
    We will discuss the precise conventions governing each section as we go along. For example, what are the subsections in "the method". But today I will introduce to you certain general rules straightaway. The first of these concerns the person to whom you should address your report, whom I shall call your reader. A very common mistake, especially early on, is to assume that your reader is the person who will be marking the report. In reality, however, the marker will be assessing your report on behalf of someone else, an idealized, hypothetical person who is intelligent, but unknowledgeable about your study and the area in which it took place. Your marker will, therefore, be checking to see that you have written your report with this sort of reader in mind. So you need to make sure that you have:
    1. Introduced the reader to the area relevant to your study;
    2. Provided the reader with the background necessary to understand what you did and why you did it;
    3. Spelt out and developed your arguments clearly;
    4. Defined technical terms; and
    5. Provided precise details of the way in which you went about collecting and analyzing the data that you obtained.
    In short, you should write for someone who knows little about your area of study, taking little for granted about your reader’s knowledge of your area of study. So, when in doubt, spell it out! This is my advice to you. If you find this difficult to do, then a useful approach is to write the report as if it will be read by someone you know who is intelligent but unknowledgeable about your subject: a friend of yours, say. Write it as if this person were going to have to read and understand it. Indeed, it is a good idea, if you can, to get just such a person to read your report before handing it in.
    The demands and expectations placed upon you will of course vary with your experience of report writing. Early on in your study as an author of experimental reports less will be expected of you than later. At this early stage you will be expected mainly to show that you understand what you did in your report and its implications, together with evidence that you have, at least a basic grasp of the demands of the report’s format. Later on, however, you will be expected to pay more attention to this research significance of what you did, though why-you-did-it part will become more important, because in being responsible for the choice of topic and design, you will be expected to be able to justify this choice. So, you must be able to tell us why it is that, given the options available to you, you decided to conduct your particular study. You will need, therefore, to develop the habit of thinking about how the ideas that you are entertaining for your experiment or study will look in the report, paying particular attention to how they will fit into the part of "introduction". Specific dangers that you must watch out for here are, first, a lack of adequate material to put in this section and, second, the undertaking of a project that lacks any research justification, because it is based on assumptions that are contradicted by existing findings in the area. Thinking clearly in advance will help you to avoid making these mistakes.
    OK. Today we’ve had a brief look at the format of the experimental reports, what each section is about and some of the basic issues like reader awareness so on and so forth. Next time we will discuss how to write up "the introduction" section.