Report
Writing: It’s nearly as important as breathing, but can feel like climbing Everest without oxygen.
Writing like any skill is something that you develop. You have to commit to getting better and it takes work. There are degrees of progress. It’s not simply a case of you can write or not. Many of you will have experienced the mystery of writing well sometimes and struggling at other times. The purpose of this checklist is to help take some of the mystery out of writing and develop habits that make good writing happen every time you pick up a pen or put fingers to the keyboard.
Your Journey as a Writer:
Most of you have made it through the steps of: recognising and forming letters, combining those to make words, combining those to make sentences, using more sophisticated language to improve interest and effectiveness. Many of you still have habits that you need to change from those early stages ie. you were taught to start sentences with capital letters in your third year of school and about proper nouns when you were 8 years old. You are now at the stage in your writing careers where you need to be developing an idea through an extended piece of writing. The language that we use for this is an essay or report.
Communicating the results of what you have found out in a report is an important skill to develop during the inquiry programme. Below are some tips to help you improve your report writing ability.
Planning
"Failing to plan is planning to fail!"
Mind map – great for generating ideas but is not an essay plan.
SAS Writing Navigator: this is a free Chrome app that helps you plan and write your report. Suggest you use it for planning then write the report in Google Docs
This shows the fertile and research questions with a simple numbered list (one for each paragraph)
Box plan
1 box = 1 paragraph = 100 words (from Dr Ian Hunter and his online writing tool – Write That Essay).
List Plan
1) write down a list of points you want to cover
2) circle the important ones
3) put them in order you want to write
Introduction
State your intent in the first paragraph: “Of all factors in employee motivation, financial reward is the most significant.”
The Introductory paragraph can be written in four sentences:
Neutral
Context
Argument
Sum up
From Topic to Thesis: Check out this advice to help you go from your topic to your thesis.
Here’s an example introduction and useful pointers.
Body paragraphs
Sentences: clarity is the goal (less than 20 words).
Check your paragraph structure by using the Highlight Tool add on to identify SEXY parts.
S- Statement/topic sentence: WHAT are you trying to argue?
E- Evidence: WHAT supports your argument
X- Explanation: HOW does your evidence support your argument
Y- Why? WHY did you include this point and HOW does it relate to your argument
Check before submitting
Use the Checklist below to help you write the best Inquiry report ever!
There are a number of tools you should use to make sure your report is free from errors (spelling and grammar) and reflects your best work.
Spelling check in Google Docs (Tools -> Spelling)
Outwrite: A Google Docs add on that gives average sentence length, readability scores and suggestions.
Paperrater.com: not only checks spelling and grammar, but also plagiarism checker and some stats on style (sentence length etc).
Hemingwayapp.com: gives advice on grammar and style. Just copy and past your report into the website.
Grammar and Spell Check: add on for Chrome that tells you the reason for grammar errors
Grammarly: this app is an add on for Chrome
Immersive Reader: an add on for Chrome that reads out loud web pages.
Analyze My Writing: this is a website that your paste your report into and it gives you writing statistics.
Listen to your writing
Read and Write add on for Chrome. Free version works for Google Docs and web sites.
Use screen reader on Google Docs to ‘listen’ to your report (great for picking up spelling and grammar that a spell check can miss).
