Report writing tips Martin HingPhD researcher Biological Sciences, University of Wollongong

Basics (in no particular order)While these points may sound trivial and not worth your time, they are actually really important for your scientific writing. Reviewers will not take you seriously if your manuscript is full of basic mistakes and it puts markers of assignments in a bad mood, continuously correcting basic errors.

Genus and species names always in italics. Genus should be capitalised.Gobiodon erythrospilus. Can be shortened after first use if it is obvious which genus you are talking about – G. erythrospilus.

Check your spelling, punctuation and grammar before submitting your assignmentso Check for full stops at the end of sentences and capitalisation of first word of new

sentenceso Don’t go crazy with commaso Check for missing ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘in’ etc.o Were vs where, there vs their vs they’re etc.

Check formatting before submittingo Avoid finishing a page with a title that belongs with the paragraph on the next pageo Check indentingo Check for double rows between paragraphs

Left align paragraphs. Don’t justify the text. It leaves big ‘rivers’ of space running though your paragraphs

Centre align equations and refer to them as you would a table or figure. Define any terms in your equation. e.g.:

Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory is formalised by Hamilton’s rule which is summarized in equation (1).

rb - c > 0 -(1)

In equation (1), r is the relatedness of the actor to the recipient of the social action and b and c are the benefits in terms of reproductive success caused by the social action to the recipient and actor respectively (Grafen, 1982).

Numbers and their units should be separated by a space.20 mm50 oC

When referencing a table or figure, make a statement and put the reference at the end of the sentence in parentheses. For example: Fish length was correlated with age (Figure 4). Don’t shorten ‘Figure’ to ‘fig’.

Don’t use unnecessary flowery or “sciency” language. Don’t use colloquial language either. Be clear, concise and most of all precise. This is a difficult skill to learn and you will only pick it up by reading the literature and practicing on your own writing.

Make good use of headings and subheadings Don’t get bogged down in the stats. Think about what the statistical results mean for the

biology of the system. For example: “The interaction was significant” Doesn’t tell you much and you are just stating the obvious if you have an effects table. “The effect of copper on invertebrate communities changed significantly depending on the rate of shipping” is much more informative and relevant to the report.

Back up statements with references to the literature or statistics. If you don’t, your work is wide open to criticism.

Commonly misspelled or misused wordsTable 1: Commonly confused words, their descriptions and examples of how to use them correctly.

Confused words Word Description ExampleTwo, to , too Two Number 2 Two samples were excluded

To Bait was used to attract animalsToo As well/in excess of Too much bait might attract bigger predators

Affect, effect Affect Results in an effect Bait choice may affect the observed speciesEffect The result of an affect The effect of bait choice was measured by...

Principal, principle Principal Primary The principal reason we chose...Principle Rule/code/theory The main principle behind the theory is...

Lead, led Lead Heavy metal (Pb) Lead weights were used...Led Guided Animals were led along the path

Accept, except Accept Agree/believe We accept the alternate hypothesisExcept exclude All sites except one were included

Non-significant, insignificant Non-significant P > 0.05 The interaction was non-significantInsignificant Minor/unimportant Swell height was insignificant compared with tidal movement

Then, than Then Next/at that time Nestlings were removed and then returned to their original nestsThan This phenomenon is more common than previously considered

There, they’re, their There Introduce an idea/indicate location There is evidence to suggest...They’re They are They’re able reveal patterns... (usually not used in formal writing)Their Belongs to them The generality of their conclusions is relatively limited

MS Word tipsApologies, I only have Word 2007, but the buttons should be pretty similar on newer versions. The idea of this guide is to get you thinking about the presentation of your reports. Once you know that the tools are available to you, it is up to you to find and use them.

When reading the shortcuts, “+” indicates that the keys should be pressed together and “-” indicates that keys should be pressed one at a time in a given sequence.

Superscripts and subscripts

Table 2: Good, bad and ugly examples of superscripts and subscripts. Use the same shortcut to turn off super/sub-script

Good Bad Ugly ShortcutSuperscript X2 X2 X^2 Ctrl + shift + =Subscript X1 X1 X(1) Ctrl + =

SymbolsUse symbols for those statistical and mathematical Greek letters. You can insert symbols in MS Word using the shortcut: ‘alt’ – ‘i’ – ‘s’ or under the insert tab.

You will then get this window where you can select your symbol:

Table 3: Good, bad and ugly examples of mathematical charactersGood Bad Uglyχ2 X2 Chi2σ2 Var() Sigma-squared

Mathematical equationsI don’t use these very often, but they can be quite useful.

Shortcut: ‘alt’ – ‘i’ – ‘o’ will bring up the object screen. Scroll down and select “Microsoft equation 3.0” or whatever version it is now up to.

Table 4: Good, bad and ugly examples of mathematical equationsGood Bad Ugly

1n∑i=1

n

x i 1/nΣxi 1/n(x1+x2+...+xn)

TablesRead some journal articles to see how tables are formatted. All tables should have the caption at the top. Specific notes can go at the bottom. Most tables take the following format (Table 2). Only include tables for clarity. If you include a table it must be referenced in your text. Avoid redundant tables. i.e. Don’t include tables of raw data or which repeat results already shown in a figure. Don’t just copy and paste JMP output either. If you want to include an effects table you will need to only the relevant parts into the format below and include an appropriate caption.

Table 2: Example of table formatting.Heading 1 Heading 2 Heading 3

A 10 Yes†

B 20 No‡

C 30 YesD 40 No

† denotes condition 1‡ denotes condition 2

Paragraph spacing is reduced so that caption is “attached” to the table

Superscripts can be used to add notes which appear at the bottom of the table. Note again the reduced spacing to keep everything together. Notes are often a smaller font size.

Top and bottom borders for the table and a bottom border for the heading row (often bold or double line). No column lines unless you really really really need to separate things for clarity.

I find it easiest to make tables in MS Excel and copy them into word, but you can make them in word if you wish.

Use the drop down arrow to select the table dimensions

You can turn on/off borders here

FiguresFigure captions at the bottom of the figure. Figures can be used to visualise your data or clarify methods or concepts. Graphs of your data are not statistical tests and do not ‘prove’ anything. They are just a visual representation of the data. A good rule of thumb for figures is “less is more”. i.e. take a minimalist approach. No grid lines. Remove those categories that MS Excel places on the graphs – describe your categories in the caption instead. Reference lines may be useful. eg. Threshold lines, 1:1 correlation lines. It should be made clear in the caption what the reference line indicates and why it is relevant.

Multiple graphs may be included in a single figure if they are related. They should be clearly designated and referred to in the caption.

Appropriate axis labels with units of measurement

Reference line

Note the reduced paragraph spacing to ‘attach the caption to the figure

Description of categories in the caption

Page breaksUse page breaks to ensure that you don’t leave paragraph headings or figure and table captions by themselves on the next/previous page. It’s best to avoid using the ‘enter’ key multiple times to drop a heading to the next page because if you go back and add more text above you will end up with big gaps between your heading and its paragraph.

If you turn on paragraph marks you can see your page breaks and delete them if necessary.

Section breaksUse these if you want to change the formatting of a paragraph of a whole page. For example if you have a big table which is best displayed in landscape orientation, you would click the drop down arrow on ‘Breaks’ and select ‘Next page’ from the menu, then set the next page’s orientation to landscape. You then need to section break at the end of your table and change the rest of the document back to portrait orientation. Columns can be added to a page in a similar manner by selecting the ‘Continuous’ break from the drop down menu.

If you turn on paragraph marks you can see your section breaks and delete them if necessary.

Keeping things together

Above, I’ve said to separate numbers and their units with a space. Sometimes this means that the units will drop over to the next line. To keep them together use a “nonbreaking space”.‘ctrl’ + ‘shift’ + ‘space’. You can also use this for shortened scientific names (e.g. G. rivulatus) where the species name drops to the next line without genus letter. Nonbreaking spaces look like this ‘o’ if you turn on paragraph marks .

“Hard returns”, ‘shift’ + ‘enter’, can also be used to drop text to the next line without a paragraph break. I usually use this for paragraph headings. If you turn on paragraph marks, hard returns and paragraph returns look like this:

On the page, it looks like this:

Hard returnParagraph return

Hard return – Keeps the same spacing as the paragraph, but continues on the next line.

Paragraph return – Adds a larger space and begins a new paragraph

Headers and footersDon’t go crazy with these. For some documents it makes sense to use them for clarity but for many shorter documents they often make the page look cluttered. Page numbers are good to include, especially if you include a table of contents, but you don’t need to repeat your name and student number at the top of every page.

Headers and footers will repeat on every page unless you use section breaks and disable the “Link to Previous” option. Double click in the top/bottom margin to open the header and footer design tab or click the header/footer buttons shown above.

If you just want a footnote at the bottom of one page, you will need to add section breaks at the top and bottom of the page and un-link the footers as above. A word of warning – This gets messy quickly if you have a lot of footnotes.

Contents tablesMostly for big reports or theses. Learning to generate a contents table automatically will save you a lot of time. Use the styles in MS Word for headings and subheadings.

To generate the contents table:

It will look something like this, but you can fiddle with the layout:

Be sure to update the table before you print or submit.

Reviewing your workIt’s always a good idea to have someone read over your work for you. After you have read it yourself several times you become blind to a lot of small errors which a new eye will often pick up.

For self review, start with a spell check:

Word count is also a very useful tool for staying within your limits or checking word limits for certain sections.

Highlighting and making comments throughout your text is a handy method for flagging things to come back to.

To highlight text, select the text and click the highlight button. You can also select colours in the drop down menu.

To make comments, highlight the text you want to comment on and click the “New Comment” button or use the shortcut: ‘alt’ – ‘i’ – ‘m’

Referencing softwareLearn to use it! Referencing software will keep your reference formatting consistent and automatically generate a bibliography at the end of your document. It will be slow at first, but it will save you a ton of time in the end!

EndNote is available free to students through the UoW library. The library also offers training on how to use EndNote: http://uow.libguides.com/content.php?pid=27129&sid=196631.

There are a heap of other referencing programs available if you don’t like EndNote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software