Writing and Presenting Research

Angela Thody

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781412902939, 9781412902922
• eBook ISBN: 9781446239117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Metodologia e ricerca nelle scienze sociali

This accessible and wide-ranging book is an invaluable introductory guide through the choices to be made when deciding how to report research. Writing and Presenting Research covers research written as theses and dissertations; chapters, books, reports and articles in academic, professional or general media such as newspapers; and also reviews the options for presenting research orally as lectures, keynotes, conference papers and even TV game shows. These forms of reporting research have well-established conventions for their formats, but they also have growing numbers of alternative possibilities. This has generated debate about what is, or is not, acceptable, and the aim of this book is to make this debate more manageable for those wanting to assess which of the conventional or alternative possibilities on offer is most appropriate for reporting their current research.

Arranged in easily followed sections enlivened with checklists, style variations, examples and reflection points, Writing and Presenting Research has relevance to the social sciences, arts, humanities, natural and applied sciences and law and is an invaluable reference tool for new and experienced researchers alike.

SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

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Part I

Preparation

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1	Conventions or Alternatives?

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CONTENTS

1.1	Debates to resolve
1.2	Context of the debates
1.3	Conventional formats
	1.3.1	Definitions
	1.3.2	Advantages
		1.3.2.1	A training ground
		1.3.2.2	Simplicity and comparability
		1.3.2.3	Political, professional and academic acceptance
		1.3.2.4	Globalization
1.4	Alternatives
	1.4.1	Gaining acceptance?
	1.4.2	Definitions
	1.4.3	Reasons for emergence of alternatives
		1.4.3.1	Postmodernism
		1.4.3.2	Changing attitudes to the natural and social sciences
		1.4.3.3	New research and technical methodologies
1.5	Resolving the debates?
	1.5.1	The middle ground
	1.5.2	The guiding principles
1.6	Chapter outlines
1.7	Review

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1.1 Debates to resolve

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This book is a guide through the choices to be made when deciding how to report research, principally in social sciences (including health), arts and humanities but also with relevance to, and examples from, natural and applied sciences and law. It covers research written as theses and dissertations, chapters, books, reports and articles in academic, professional or general media such as newspapers. It reviews the options for presenting research orally as lectures, keynotes, conference papers and even TV game shows.

All of these forms of reporting research have well established conventions for their formats. All of them also have growing numbers of alternative possibilities. These have generated debate about what is or is not acceptable. My aim is to make this debate more manageable for those wanting to assess which of the conventional formats (1.3) or alternative possibilities (1.4) on offer is most appropriate for reporting their current research.

This debate, polarizing conventions and alternatives, was encapsulated for me in a conversation with fellow conference delegates following an academic’s word-for-word reading aloud of his conventional research paper. The listeners’ views on the presenter differed radically. I report this ‘mini’ research into their opinions as a poem in Box 1.1.

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Box 1.1 Differentiating conventional and alternative research writing styles: poetic format

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Conference Debate

It’s like listening to poetry,

He said.

I go to a conference to hear the poetry of the paper;

The paper is like poetry read by the real, actual writer,

Word for word,

Like all papers,

He said.

I learn later from reading the paper,

But not at the conference.

There you only go to hear researchers as poets.

You hear them interpreting their own poetry of words,

Their nuances, their cadences, their enthusiasm.

They do not need to explain them to YOU.

It is enough to be close to academic celebrities,

He said.

It should be teaching,

She said.

I go to a conference to learn from the presentation of the paper,

It is research, explained by the originator,

Just the main issues,

Different styles,

She said.

You should comprehend from hearing a clear summary of the paper

There, at the conference.

You see researchers illuminating with PowerPoint,

Duplicated notes, pictures, sound, enthusiasm;

They feel the need to share with US.

So you are close to great teachers,

She said.

Angela Thody, 2005

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Did my poem appeal to you, annoy you or intrigue you, as an ‘alternative’ way of reporting research data? Is it appropriate for the opening of a textbook on research writing and presentation? Did the visual differences in the layout of the two verses add to, or detract from, the message? Should the personal forms of ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘you’ in this chapter so far have been mixed with the impersonal (it, one)? These exemplify the types of questions which this book explores.

To illustrate the opposite pole in this debate, the poem’s information in conventional, ‘textbook’ form is in Box 1.2. What is your reaction to this?

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Box 1.2 Differentiating conventional and alternative research writing styles: textbook format

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Two styles are suggested to which research reporting should conform:

either

Accepted academic conventions, as summed up by an academic journal editor, ‘make life easier for our referees by writing a clear, concise paper; that is, structured in a traditional manner’ (Murray, 2004: 1). Natural and social scientists therefore report their research in strictly uniform scientific experiment format; humanities’ authors follow chronological, or logical, formats. Both indicate objectivity, neutrality, researcher distance and impersonality.

or

‘Innovative, user-friendly formats’ (Gomm and Davies, 2000: 141) associated with postmodernism and its doubt that there is any one right method. All methods are deemed subjective; they represent particular viewpoints of which the researcher’s is one. Research reporting formats embrace widely differing approaches such as poetry, photography or novelistic style. Subjectivity is unavoidable, bias is openly stated, researchers reveal themselves overtly, and personality is more than welcome.

A. Thody, 2005

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1.2 Context of the debates

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Unusual modes for academic writing are nothing new. Cobbett’s 1818 guide to alternatives for the conventions of English grammar, for example, written as letters to his son, was described as ‘more entertaining than many novels … his Grammar is unlike any other’ (O’London, 1924: 48). A 2003 example of the same unconventionality in the grammar textbook genre is Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss (2003) which leavens language rules with humour and idiosyncratic proselytizing.

Nor have the ways which I have termed ‘conventional’ always been thus. An American 1955 study by Butts of assumptions underlying Australian education, for example, consisted of chatty personal reflections from random encounters. It was regarded as conventional and good research, yet there was no rigorous sample selection, literature review or methodology (Thody, 1994a). Butts was simply a travel writer of his day doing what we might now dismiss as ‘educational tourism’, but the social sciences had little opportunity to do anything else for some time. As recently as 1979, for example, Parsons and Lyons pleaded that university researchers should be able to get into real schools and risk interviewing real administrators, something we now see as normal and vital. Until then, surveys through questionnaires had dominated subjects such as education management research, for example. Utilizing conventional scientific formats for this type of research fitted the data well and also accorded with the desire of the social sciences to be accepted as being as rigorous as the natural sciences.

This desire to be like the natural sciences can be accounted for by the dominance of positivism for the first half of the twentieth century. Positivism gave credibility to many disciplines and dictated their forms (Hughes, 1990: 36). The scientific formats of writing that emerged from this positivism were adopted by the academic social science writers of the 1960s onwards. In doing so, however, they:

broke with their own inherited traditions … They showed little of the nostalgia toward lost practices … They worked new devices … to support greater ease of access and better serve the interests of scholarship. (Willinski, 2000: 62)

These are the same objectives that helped to propel a new debate about research writing and presenting from the 1990s, since by then there had been a huge diaspora in research methods, not matched by variety in the academic formats of reporting research. It had also been realized that all research, from any discipline and in any format, has an endemic ‘literary dimension … yet concealed by realist metaphysics’ (Scott and Usher, 1999: 19–20). The concealment lies in applying conventional, scientific formats for writing and presenting resear...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Boxes
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Hazard Warning
• Appreciation
• PART I PREPARATION
• PART II SELECTION AND REDUCTION
• PART III PRODUCTION
• PART IV PUBLICATION: REFERENCE GUIDES
• PART V VALEDICTION
• Bibliography
• Index