Report Writing

Language for report writing

The purpose of scientific and report writing is to communicate ideas in a way that is efficient and simple to understand. Though your report will include some specialist vocabulary, you do not need present your ideas in a complicated way or use unnecessarily complex language. Here are some key points to help develop your scientific/report writing:

1. ​Personal vs Impersonal Voice

Report writing should be written in a formal, impersonal way; this means avoiding the inclusion of personal expressions or statements to ensure that your work is impartial and objective. Consider the following example:

"The kids were totally wrecked" vs. "Many participants seemed tired: most were yawning, and some had fallen asleep".

The first example uses informal and subjective language ("kids", "wrecked") and fails to convey the information in an impartial way. By contrast, the second example tells the reader the relevant information but does so in a way that is objective and clear, rather than being vague or open to interpretation.

2. Tenses

Reports are usually largely written in the past tense as they often describe events, such as experiments/observations that happened before the time of writing. It is important to note however, that you will not write your whole report exclusively in the past tense. For example:

The past tense will be used when writing your literature review and describing methods:

"Grayson and Drake (2017) found that…"

"The data were analysed using a…"

The present tense will be used when detailing your interpretation of your results and conclusions:

"These results seem to suggest that…"

"This provides a clear demonstration of…"

The future tense will be used when describing your recommendations for future research/recommendations for professional practice:

Though these results represent a promising first step, future research must seek to…"

It will be necessary for future researchers to address…"

Appropriately using a combination of these tenses in your writing will help to improve the clarity of your writing.

3. Technical Terms

As mentioned before, you will be required to use some specialist language but you should try and keep this to a minimum - don't try and show off by overloading your writing with unnecessarily technical language! Relatedly, whilst abbreviations can be helpful when used appropriately, too many abbreviations can actually make your report harder to understand. As a guide, if an abbreviation is in common use, feel free to use it in your report (remembering to write the name out in full the first time you use it), if not, don't start creating abbreviations just to save words or avoid repetition! For example, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" is commonly referred to as "MRI" so this would be appropriate to use in your report, whereas "sleep deprivation" is not generally abbreviated, so substituting this for "SD" in your writing would not be appropriate.

Good scientific and report writing requires the same level of planning and attention to detail that you put into designing experiments, and collecting/analysing data.

For more tips on scientific writing, take a look at this handy guide from Hallam Library.