Janene van Loon, Arnoud Thüss, Nicole Schmidt and Kevin Haines - Academic Writing in English

1 Introduction to academic writing

■■ gather information; ■■ interpret the information; ■■ write a paper or present the research.

Research reports are usually written in chronological order. There are ques tions that pop up naturally during the process and need to be answered in the report; they are closely related to the phases of the research process: ■■ What is the context of your research? ■■ What is the problem that you want to solve? What do you want to prove? ■■ How did you investigate it? ■■ How does your method compare to what other researchers have done? ■■ What was the result of your investigation? What did you find? ■■ What do those findings mean? How should they be interpreted? ■■ What do they contribute to existing knowledge? In what way has the world changed, if only just a little bit, after your study? The report is often preceded by a short abstract in which the content is sum marised. The abstract and the questions above are represented in this fre quently used logical formal structure: ■■ abstract

■■ introduction ■■ methodology ■■ results ■■ discussion ■■ conclusion

This is often referred to in the academic writing literature as the IMRD or IMRaD Model, which stands for Introduction, Methodology, Results, and Discussion. The structure of this Model will be discussed in more detail in Section 3.6. The reliability of the information in research reports is of crucial importance. Therefore, before publication, articles are reviewed by fellow scientists work ing in the same field, also called peers . An article is only accepted if the meth odology used is systematically approved.

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