Don’t Get Psyched About Psychological Report Writing

Your hands are shaking, and I can see fear in your eyes… Congratulations! You have just joined the “The Painful Report Writing Club”. Do you really think that I’m going to let you stay there for long? I’m here, signed, sealed, delivered, to help you with report writing.
What is it that makes you uncertain? You don’t have to be a writing genius to be successful in report writing. It can be done with the help of concrete previous experiences, brainstorms and deep analysis of the psychologist or any other person, academic or not, connected somehow to the problem. Good report writing contains four parts: Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion.
One thing you do need for writing a report is a sufficient reason. Wait a minute… are you still sitting in your “Painful Report Writing Club”? I thought I told you to come out of there. Go and look for your topic. Found one? Good, now you can treat yourself with sweets and start working on the first part – the Introduction.
Successful report writing depends a lot on the Introduction. This is where you set your point and present the researches that were made on this topic. Make sure you’ve outlined the method that you are going to use in your report writing. One more advice on writing a report: your topic has already been investigated. You need to give a reply on those questions that are still unanswered. This is the area of your research.
What are you eating? Oh, sweets… I see. I’m here helping you with report writing, and you don’t even want to share a piece… Thanks. And now back to our report writing.
Want to know, which part is the easiest in writing a report? It’s the Method section. The golden rule is to study the Method sections, and provide the same amount of detail as recently published articles.
Next part in our successful report writing is the Results section. Fred Durst said, “Results may vary”. But you are listening to me, hopefully. And I’m telling you that in a questionnaire study you should mention the response rate; in an observational study, say what the behavior actually looked like; in a cognitive experiment, say whether the participants enjoyed the task, found it difficult etc. Good report writing means simply doing your job accurately. Can you turn your radio down a little bit? I can’t even hear myself.
What are we talking about? Oh, writing a report… And our next step in writing a report is the Discussion section. Remember the observations done in your Results part? Well, it’s time to talk about them. Speaking of psychology, do you want to talk about them?
Good report writing assumes that you answer the specific questions, which are posed at the end of the Introduction; then you work back to more general issues. When writing a report, you should also introduce ideas, or cite papers, that have not already been mentioned in the Introduction.
And now it’s time for some general help on writing a report. First of all it’s about your style. Nice shoes! But I’m talking about the way you write. Keep your sentences short. Like I do it. See? This way it’s easier to deal with punctuation in report writing.
Stick to the scientific writing style. Why are you putting these glasses on? All I meant was that in successful report writing you don’t have use metaphors, alliterations, parallel structuring, oxymoron and where are you going? I thought I’m helping you with report writing, and not confusing you.
My advice on writing a report is that you take care of your grammar. It really does help to know some technical grammatical terms, both to make it easier to look up correct usage, and also because you can't really think about writing unless you know some words to describe what you are doing.
Well, I better go now. My favorite show is on in 5 minutes. Hope, I was of some help.