Reporting results

Elements of technical communication

All effective technical communication has the same elements:.

What is the short message?
What is the problem and what is already known about it?
What is to be done about it, and how?
What are the results?
What do the results tell us, and what should we do about it?
What references were cited in the above?

In a scientific report, these elements are labeled with headings: typically, Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, References. You need to adapt them to your form of communication. For example, in a proposal you don't have Results and Discussion yet, but you can say what you expect the results to be. In a theoretical study, you don't have Materials.

Within sections, break the material into subsections with lower-level headings. A reader should be able to read only these subheadings and know roughly what the paper is about. Within subsections, break the material into paragraphs, each of which tries to make one principal point. Start each paragraph with an assertion of that point. A reader should be able to read only the first sentence of each paragraph and know roughly what the author is saying in the paper. In the remainder of each paragraph, elaborate on and support the assertion made in the first sentence.

Common weaknesses: uninformative title, no (or too-detailed) summary, too little intro, low information density

A common structural weakness of beginning writers and speakers is in the setup. They assume the recipient already knows what they are going to talk about and is already at their level of background -- is, in short, themselves. They won't state their purpose. They'll start with their results, omitting to tell how they got there. Or they may deliver a long, technically detailed introduction full of undefined terms and irrelevant material. Sometimes the title will be missing or will consist of some empty phrase such as "Analysis of DNA".

The number of words you produce doesn't get you points in technical communication. What matters is the amount of useful information you transmit, with the lowest demand on the recipient's time and effort.

A summary (abstract) is short. What is the problem, what you did about it, how, what you found. (If it's a research proposal, of course, these things need to be in the future tense). Details belong in the Introduction. Discussion belongs in the Discussion.

Data but no interpretation

A heap of rocks is not a house. Data are not information. Show only the data that are necessary to support your interpretation. The more data you have, the more your presentation must consist of summary statistics or graphics rather than the raw data.

A Golden Rule of communication

If you're trying to understand something, do you want to waste your time deciphering pages of misspelled, disorganized fluff? I don't think so. You want the news, put in terms you can comprehend and, if helpful, illustrated. Any success in communication I've had has come from trying to explain a thing to others the way I would have liked it to be explained to me, if I didn't already know it..

Three qualities of effective communication

that seem to be generally agreed upon, are (in this order of priority):

truth
clarity
brevity

Once you understand why these guidelines work, you can go on to making your presentations elegant, persuasive, and entertaining.

And for non-native speakers...

Non-native English speakers (or poor native English writers) should apply a spell-checking utility (such as provided by Microsoft Word) to reports before submitting. This will avoid errors in the ordinary words, though the spell checker's glossary is unlikely to know words like "bioinformatics" or "glycosylate".

As for sentence structure, Word evaluates it, but not well. A much better plan than relying on this prop is to learn the structure of the language. I feel that communication skills are more important to your professional success than subject knowledge. In any language, people who can say clearly and persuasively what they know (even if they don't know very much) get more of the goodies than inarticulate people (even if they know a lot).

Common shortcomings in writing by foreign students involve the misuse of the article ("a" and "the"), since many foreign languages don't have articles. Using these wrongly will change the meaning of your sentence to something you don't want. Among other words that can do this, and that students often misuse, are transition words. These are adverbs or adverbial phrases that bind two ideas together, and they're important because your job is to tell a coherent story by putting your thoughts in a sensible order . Transitions include moreover, besides, however, on the other hand, alternatively, in addition, for this reason, in contrast, in consequence, finally, in view of X, thereby, therefore, and many others.

To improve your English writing, one resource is the well-done and enjoyable Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch.

Reporting results on a WWW page

You should begin to see all of your written work as publication. Consider that you're presenting it, for study and criticism, to your most discriminating colleagues and your prospective employers and clients. Thinking in this way is especially important when you publish on the WWW, where millions of people can see your work. This exposure is a Good Thing for your professional appearance-- unless your work is sloppy.

An HTML document, like any other, aims to communicate useful information clearly and economically and provide an archivable historical record. It also has some special advantages over paper, in the form of hyperlinks, dynamic formatting (the page rearranges its contents when the window is resized), and abundant graphics possibilities -- plus embedded scripts, which we won't further discuss here. Here are a few simple guidelines for writing effective WWW reports and other documents:

Provide context. Add your name, the date of publication of your document, and your institutional affiliation, or provide a hyperlink that takes the viewer back to all contextual information. Give your report a title that describes the contents -- no journal ever accepted a manuscript entitled "Project Report". Be sure readers will know why the document has been published (for example, as your research-project report for PLPTH 890). You can supply all of this information on a title page or on the first page of the report. Do not think that you are taking overly elaborate measures for a relatively minor piece of schoolwork. The habit of documenting your work will well repay the minor cost in time.
Use the text elements provided by HTML. That is, use headings 1 through 6 to organize your hierarchy of meaning (you do have one, don't you?). Use lists and tables to present data in an orderly way. Use left, right, and center justification and positioning of images relative to text. Don't use spaces or tabs to position anything. In general don't create your own elements by hand -- it usually won't give you the consistency that the built-in elements guarantee.
Use hyperlinks gracefully. Don't insert meaningless names in order to link from them, like this: Link. Instead, link from a word or phrase in your document that describes what the reader can expect to find at the other end of the link. Do not clutter your text with long, useless URLs: "I aligned the sequence at http://npsa-pbil.ibcp.fr/cgi-bin/npsa_automat.pl?page=/NPSA/npsa_clustalw.html". Instead, create an informatively named link: "I aligned the sequence with NPSA_CLUSTALW.
Don't force the reader to download or open a file to see an image. Place the image directly in your document near the text that refers to it, or place a hyperlink to its position in another page, using an anchor if necessary so that the page will open at the proper position.