After completing your research, you will need to communicate your findings to others. Understanding the needs and wants of your audience in relation to your research is essential. You will be communicating a complex message, so your report writing style needs to be appropriate for your audience. To this end, you will need to know who your potential audience is. You will need to know what the protocols are for reporting findings that are specific to your discipline. Different disciplines have subtle but important requirements for the reporting of research. Having engaged with the resources related to this chapter, you should be able to develop the skills necessary to identify your potential audience and report your findings to them. The companion website gives examples from researchers about how they have identified and engaged with audiences through reporting their research.

[Interviewer, off camera] So Gareth, a researcher has undertaken the data collection, their analysis, they’re at the stage where they are ready to start to communicate what they found out, what would you say is the key purpose of the research report?

Ok, at the end of the day, the research is basically pointless unless you tell somebody about it, and the report is the vehicle for telling anybody who is interested about what you’ve found. It’s essential that you do that effectively, there are actually ethical implications to writing the report because if you’ve actually undertaken research and gathered data from participants, it’s actually unethical not to report those findings because otherwise you’ve simply wasted the participants’ time. So it goes to show that writing the report isn’t simply a case of putting it down on paper to make a record of it, the purpose of the report is to let everybody know what you have found out from your research. The important point about the report is that it must be written in an appropriate style for the audience. That’s something you should be considering right at the very beginning of the research process. So the report isn’t something that you do at the end of the process, the report is something you’ll do right at the very beginning. You’ll think about who’s going to be the consumer of your research, who’s going to be the audience and you need to write for that audience. So you need to think about, well, “my audience is likely to be” if you’re doing a piece of research as part of your academic career, then your supervisors will be the audience, the person who marks the report, might not necessarily be your supervisor, they’ll be the audience as well. So will your external examiners, and beyond that, it might well be your peers as well because your report should be available for other people to see at some point or other as well, because let’s face it, people who follow you subsequently in your academic career might want to read what you’ve written. So your audience, you need to think carefully who your audience actually is, and that will lead then to the inevitable question “OK, how do I write for that audience?” Do you write in lay language, or do you write highly technical language, and the consumers of your report will determine how you write that report. I think as well, it’s very very important that when you are writing your report, you communicate clearly and effectively. If your written standard of communication is poor, then you will not be transmitting that complex message that you’re trying to put across effectively. If you are writing your report for academic purposes, for your dissertation or whatever it might be, clearly then whoever’s marking it, if they’re struggling to understand your message, they’re not going to be able to give you marks for it. So effective, clear, simple communication is very important.

[Interviewer, off camera] Gareth, you’ve talked about the importance of writing the report for the audience. Will there be any considerations to think about for students in different disciplines around the purpose, the format of the report?

Yeah, absolutely. Different disciplines will have different requirements about how you structure your reports. Different disciplines will generally speaking, reports generally follow a pretty standard format in terms of, you’ll have an abstract, an introduction, a methods section, your results, conclusions etcetera and discussion. They are usually pretty standard but the way you actually structure those different sections will change from discipline to discipline. So it’s important to understand the requirements of your specific discipline. Certainly when you start writing for journals, different journals will have different styles and you’re going to need to adhere to those. And of course, the institution that you happen to be working in will also have its own requirements. So talk to your supervisor at a very early stage about how you’re going to need to structure this report that you’re going to write.