Before you begin working on your final report, ensure that you have done the analysis portion correctly. If you haven’t done your analysis correctly, it is impossible to get an A on your final report. If you did do it correctly, it will be much easier to write your final report.
Ground your thesis statement by making it the answer to your research question and the solution suggested by your research findings to the social problem you have been trying to understand. Make sure you have a clear and strong thesis statement, or you cannot get a top grade.
Explain how your thesis statement emerges from your research findings by listing the relevant codes and memos in your introduction, then discussing them each in turn in the body of your report.
DO NOT get bogged down rehashing your secondary research. You may use most of the writing you’ve already done for your proposal, but it must be edited and anything that is no longer relevant to your findings should be deleted.
Follow a structure that makes sense for your findings. Refer to the textbook and powerpoint materials on how to structure your report. If you aren’t sure how to do it on your own, use the outline structure from the PowerPoint slides (see ppt slideshow in this folder).
Make your writing flows from one paragraph to the next. Use transition sentences. Make your writing as beautiful as possible. Use your spell checker and grammar checker, even if you don’t think you need to. Trust me, you need to. Read your written report out loud, as that can help you identify grammatical and word choice errors.
Make sure you have properly referenced every paraphrase and quote you’ve borrowed from other authors, as failing to do so is plagiarism.
Make sure any elements you carry over from your research proposal to your report are rewritten so that they reflect the past tense instead of the future tense.
Proof read, edit and revise your report before you hand it in.
Make sure your bibliography from your lit review section is AFTER the report’s last page. (Yes, I have to write this, as some people are very lazy and think they can just copy/paste their full lit review into their final report!)
