A GUIDE TO REPORT AND ESSAY WRITING: Gathering your material and keeping notes
Introduction
The purpose of this guide is to provide you with information on how to prepare effective coursework assignments at the Aberdeen Business School, and ultimately, effective research reports throughout your career.
The guide focuses on the approach that you should adopt to gathering, analysing and developing your material.
It is recommended that you refer to this guide each time you begin work on a new coursework assignment. The effort that you make at this stage will be reflected in the quality of the work that you eventually submit, and in the grade that you will be awarded.
Gathering your material: sources of information
In order to understand all the various aspects of a coursework assignment, you will be expected to read several sources on the subject of the coursework, selecting relevant quotations and ideas, and then writing your assignment in your own words based on:
· what you have read;
· what you think about what you have read (i.e. whether you agree with it or not, if it ties up with your experience).
As you prepare the substance of your report or essay, you need to make sure that all your arguments are substantiated. Therefore, your opinions need to be supported by reasoning based on evidence or accepted theories, or both. You need to make good notes from the sources that you have examined, and you need to be able to find them easily once you start writing.
For most assignments, using the lecturer’s course notes is not appropriate. For some assignments, you may need to use relevant course material supplied by the lecturer, and this will normally be specified in the instructions for the assignment.
All your coursework should be firmly based on the accepted theories and concepts in the appropriate subject area. These are usually described in the standard textbooks on the topic. You are expected to refer to these at appropriate points in your report or essay, giving adequate acknowledgement to the original author through referencing.
You are also expected to support your argument by referring to examples appropriate to the particular context of your essay or report, whether you are discussing a country, its institutions, or its commercial and industrial practices. These examples should be based on information selected from relevant secondary sources, such as journals, newspapers, government statistics, trade surveys, or web sites, and you are expected to acknowledge the source of this information.
Once you have clarified the objectives of your assignment, you should then write down key words that describe all the factors that you think might be relevant. You should use these key words to search for relevant material in the Library catalogue, in the general and subject encyclopaedias that you will find in the Library’s Reference section, and in the databases that index journals and newspapers. These databases are available on CD-ROM in the Library or online through the Library’s web pages. The Library staff will show you how to search the databases if you are not familiar with them. The full text of many of the journal articles or newspaper reports is also available online, and is linked directly to the indexing database, so that you can access them quickly to assess their relevance to your report or essay.
A search through ‘Google’ or one of the other Web search engines will simply throw up a lot of information that may take you a long time to sort and, unless it is from an ‘official’ web site, the accuracy of much of the information available on the World Wide Web cannot be verified. You should, therefore, search the Web only as a last resort. The exception is ‘Google Scholar’, which reports only papers published in rec
