Some Things I Learned From Writing My First Research Report
Last summer, I was tasked with writing a report about the research I completed and submitting it to my supervisor by the end of the summer. I, of course, had never done this kind of writing before, so I learned several lessons. The hard way. The learning process was super painful, but it did come in handy when I had to write two other research reports in my classes last fall. Here are a few of the lessons I learned.
1. Start writing, in any form, as early as possible. Your future self will thank you.
The time I spent writing things in a coherent form ahead of time felt wasted in the moment, but it was, counterintuitively, the absolute best way to save time. I struggled so hard to write up coherent notes as I was reading and working on things, and some of my notes never made it into a typed form, but the writing I did do ahead of time was the foundation of my report. Sometimes it felt like writing was taking away from working on things, or from reading, or from coding, but it was just as important to digest, think about, and synthesize the different things I was doing, and writing, at its core, is thinking. I find it useful to have a good record of what I learned, and what I was thinking at different points, so I’m always trying to get better about writing as I go.
I think it also would have been extremely useful to go back through old notes, both typed and handwritten – especially to type up my handwritten notes. That likely would have given me a reasonable amount of stuff to think about while writing the report, as well as lots of additional material to put in various places – the vast majority of my notes are written by hand, actually. Also, handwritten notes aren’t really searchable, which I usually don’t consider to be a problem, until it is.
2. Having an organized list of consulted sources is key.
The amount of time I spent trying to relocate articles or papers I consulted, then lost track of, during the course of the project was mildly concerning. I should have kept track of everything I read somewhere – I really should have kept a document with a bunch of titles and links to articles and papers, at a bare minimum. An ideal approach would have been to write brief summaries of their contents and main ideas, and I really should have kept it somewhere accessible. The problem is that at the beginning of a project, you read so many things, but you have no idea what will or won’t be relevant. Or sometimes, partway through the project, you read something by chance that you think won’t be relevant later, but it turns out to be useful at the end of the project, and now you have to rely on your terrible memory and frantic searching to find it. I think in the future I will strive to have complete records, even if barebones and mediocre in content. Or maybe that’s what citation managers are for. I haven’t really figured that out yet.
3. Outlining is helpful, even if it’s just a quick “checklist” of ideas.
Making an outline ahead of time was really useful, despite the fact that I didn’t stick to it. Having a rough idea of where I was going and of what I wanted before I jumped into writing was useful. However, what would have been nice is if I had jotted down the main points I wanted to put in each section ahead of time, and if I had sort of kept adding to the outline as I went along. Near the end of the project, I was carrying so much information in my head – way too much information, it felt like – and I should have found some way to write brief notes of the important thoughts in a semi-organized fashion. There were some points floating around in my head that never made it into the report, but should have – they slipped out of my memory as I was frantically writing other parts of the report. It would have been helpful to sort of have a “main checklist” of important ideas for the report.
4. The “writing up” stage can involve a lot more than just writing.
The “writing process” isn’t just writing, it’s also doing things like making figures and whatnot. That can be just as time-consuming as writing. The problem with this, obviously, is that making the figures needs to come first in a lot of ways, because a) you need to refer to them within the text and b) you might actually need them to visualize them and understand your data and conclusions before you start writing anything to do with the conclusions. I didn’t really understand this before I started, and didn’t really allocate enough time to do it. But now I know, I guess.
And oh God, figures. Making the figures and tables was so painful and I had no idea how to do it. The designer in me wanted to scream when I looked at them, and I was even sure if the data representations I chose were the right ones or meaningful. (But then again, this was a four month undergraduate research project so I doubt my supervisor really cared.) At some point I’m going to have to look into how to properly communicate data and scientific results, and also in how to present them well, because I sense it might be something I’ll eventually want to get good at.
5. Don’t bother trying to write your report in order, it’s counterproductive.
Research papers are written in reverse order, paradoxically. You can’t start at the beginning and end at the end; you start at the end (sort of) and end at the beginning, because each of the sections suggests things that should go in the previous sections. And it’s sort of an iterative thing, too: as you write (hopefully as you go), and as you continue your research, all of the sections should change.
My report writing process happened in a super wack order. I wrote the introduction and prior works sections last, for the most part. I think I started with the appendices, because I had energy to write them and had a pretty good idea of what I was going to put in them. (My report had like, four appendices.) I think I then wrote the results, then the conclusion, then worked my way back up the sections of the report. This writing out of order business, by the way, is another reason why I found having some sort of outline to be so useful.
All of that being said, honestly, the best order in which to write up your research is in whatever order will cause actual writing to happen. I took two courses with small projects last fall, and was so crunched for time when writing the reports that I essentially wrote them straight through, from beginning to end. I find that I write a lot more linearly when I’m tight on time.
6. Please don’t insert your citations manually. There are so much better ways to cite things.
BibLaTeX (or BibTeX, whichever you prefer) is awesome – as long as you can actually get it to work. This package made doing citations so much easier and I wish I’d come across it before. However, it was a massive pain to get working at first. LaTeX compiler does like to scream at people, so you might have to fight it a little. (I’m sure Word also has some sort of reference manager equivalent, but I’m not in the habit of writing long humanities papers so I’ve never bothered to try using it.)
Generally speaking, I found LaTeX to be quite frustrating to use at times. Things would just break and I had no idea why. I copied and pasted a lot of code from the internet that I didn’t quite understand and had to just stumble around and google obscure error messages until things worked. I think this might just be the average LaTeX user experience. At some point I should probably sit down and learn more about how to write packages and macros.
7. Not everything you write will make it in, and that’s okay.
A lot of the report writing process seemed to also be the process of thinking about the work I’d spent the summer doing, which meant that I wrote a lot of things that never made it in. Not everything you write is actually useful to other people – some of it is really just for you. I’m starting to suspect this is especially true in academic writing – it seems to be this exercise of making sure you have the foundations and depths and details clear in your own head, then presenting only a streamlined view of the things that will be new to your audience (which, in academic contexts, can essentially be assumed to be an expert with tons of background knowledge.)
A lot of the writing process is actually cutting, and rephrasing things to be more precise, and trying to get the strongest view of the point across. Each section should really only be about one thing, and anything that doesn’t directly advance the “plot” should likely be relegated to an appendix. I think I might be the kind of person who has trouble focusing on a single idea sometimes. I really had to learn to get to the point.