The course develops technical writing skills necessary to communicate information gained through a process of technical or experimental work. The course highlights the factors that determine the degree of technicality of the language and concepts involved. You will learn how to write different technical reports, e.g., laboratory reports, research reports, design and feasibility reports, progress reports, consulting reports, etc. The course also approaches several language, structure, style, and content issues that you can encounter while reporting the results of your research.
Primary Research
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From the course by Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Technical Writing
39 ratings
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
39 ratings
Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization English for Research Publication Purposes
From the lesson
Module III: Researching Your Subject
This module will help you develop an enhanced understanding of such types of technical documentation as feasibility and recommendation reports, instructions as well as laboratory research. The module covers issues related to various types of academic and workplace research. The focus is on acquiring the best available information – the most accurate, most unbiased, most comprehensive, and most current.
Meet the Instructors
Elena BazanovaDirector of the Language Training and Testing Center
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Although the library and
the Internet of a wealth of authoritative information in the workplace,
you will often need to conduct primary research because you need new information.
There are several major categories of primary research, observations and
demonstrations, inspections,
experiments, field research, interviews, inquiries, and questionnaires.
Observation and demonstration are two common forms of primary research.
When you observe, you simply watch some activity
to understand some specific aspects of this activity.
For instance, if you were trying to determine whether the location of
the break room was interfering with work on the factory floor,
you could observe the situation preferably at different times of the day and
in different days of the week.
If you saw workers distracted by people moving in and out of the room, or
by sounds made in the room, you would record your observations
by taking notes, taking photos, or shooting videos of events.
An observation might lead to other forms of primary research.
You might, for example, follow up by interviewing some
employees who could help you understand what you observed.
When you witness a demonstration, you are watching someone carrying out a process.
For instance, if your company was considering buying a mail sorting machine,
you could arrange to visit the manufacturers facility
where technicians would show how the machine works.
If your company was considering a portable machine such as a laptop computer,
manufacturers or dealers could demo their product of their facility.
When you plan to observe visitation or witness a demo, prepare beforehand.
Write down the questions you need to be answered or
the factors you want to investigate.
Prepare interview questions in case you have a chance to speak with someone.
Think about how you are going to incorporate the information you acquire
into the document you will write.
Inspections are like observations, but you participate more actively.
For example, a civil engineer can determine what causes a crack
in a foundation by inspection by the site.
Walking around, looking at the crack, photographing it and
its surrounding scene, examining the soil, for example.
Sometimes, inspection techniques are more complicated.
A civil engineer inspecting foundation cracking might want to test his
hatches by bringing soil samples back to the lab for analysis.
Learning to conduct the many kinds of experiments
used in the particular field take months or even years.
In many cases, conducting an experiment involves four phases.
Establishing a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis,
analyzing the data, and reporting the data.
Whereas an experiment yields quantitative data,
they typically can be measured precisely, most film research is qualitative.
That is, it yields data that typically cannot be measured precisely.
Often, in field research, you seek to understand the quality of an experiment.
Some kinds of studies have both quantitative and qualitative elements.
Interviews are extremely useful when you need informational subjects
that are too new to have been discussed in the professional literature or
are too narrow for widespread publication.
In choosing a person to interview, answer three questions.
What questions do you want to answer?
Who could provide this information?
And is the person willing to be interviewed?
A useful alternative to a personal interview is to send an inquiry.
This inquiry can take the form of a letter, email or
a message sent through an organization's website.
Although digital inquiries are more convenient
for both the sender and the recipient, a physical letter is more formal and
therefore might be more appropriate if the topic is important or relates to safety.
Questionnaires enable you to solicit information from a large group of people.
You can send questionnaires through the email, or email them,
present them as forms on a website, or use survey software such as SurveyMonkey.
Unfortunately, questionnaires
rarely yield completely satisfactory results for three reasons.
Some of the questions will misfire.
Respondents will misinterpret some of your questions, or supply useless answers.
You won't obtain as many responses as you want.
The response rate will almost never exceed 50%.
It most cases, it will be closer to 10% to 20%.
You cannot be sure that the respondents are representative.
People who feel strongly about an issue are much more likely to respond
to questionnaires then those who do not.
For this reason, you need to be careful in drawing conclusions based
on a small number of responses you asked in your questionnaire.
Ask effective questions, use unbiased language and
be specific, include an introductory explanation with the questionnaire.
This explanation should clearly indicate who you are, why you are writing, what you
plan to do with the information from the questionnaire, and when you will need it.
Before you send out any questionnaire, show it and its
accompanying explanation to a few people who can help you identify any problems.
After you have revised the material, test them on people
whose backgrounds are similar to those of your intended respondents.
To decide where and how to present the data
that you acquire from the questionnaire, think about your audience and purpose.
Start with this principle.
Important information is presented and analyzed in the body of your document,
whereas less important information is presented in an appendix.
Most often, different versions of the same information appear in both places.
In technical writing,
research reports are focused objective inquiries into technical subjects.
Private research refers to the actual work done in the laboratory or in the field.
In other words,
this means the various experiments and surveys done by an individual.
In this type of report, you present your data and
draw questions about it, but also explain the methodology and
describe the equipment and facilities used and give some background on the problem.
A research report is used in scientific writing to present the results of
an experimental study.
The core of the search report is the materials, methods, and
results of the study.
In technical writing,
these reports are specifically geared to the purpose at hand.
The readers who will use them, the clients who will read them, and
whatever limitations have been placed on the scope of the project.
Technical research reports frequently focus on you evolving,
sometimes purely hypothetical technologies.
In which case, they can be called state of the art reports.
In some cases, research reports may focus on past technology.
In which case, they are called historical reports.
One distinguishing characteristic of research reports
is the extensive research and documentation required.
The research may consist of library and laboratory research, interviews,
questionnaires, various types of culprit technical reports, and
trade journal articles.
Also, research report writers increasingly
use their wealth of information on the Internet, unlike laboratory boards.
However, research reports
often do not involve doing the actual research being reported.
They frequently present the findings of research that has already been done.
The organization of a research report is straight forward.
However, what goes in the discussion section depends on the topic and
the specific requirements for the research.
If the purpose is to report on how you got to where you are in developing a certain
technology, the discussion will be primarily historical.
But if the purpose is to describe new evolving technologies,
the discussion may be geared more to future implications.
Introduction, the first section of the research report is the introduction.
It may provide some background, but not more than a paragraph or two in a one or
two page introduction.
Start with the purpose statement to explain why you are writing the report.
Then you need to state the problem that the report addresses.
In the research report, note that the problem is really more of a general
background statement that expands on the topic and
gives a brief context for what the report will investigate.
Scope of this report, in any research paper,
you cannot possibly research anything or everything about your topic.
Human knowledge is not that simple or easy and there is too much of it.
So you will have to limit your paper by including
only certain aspects of your topic.
To complete the introduction,
provide a scope statement that addresses this limitation.
This section tells the readers what you are including in the paper and why,
and it articulates the rationale for the limitations you are imposing.
The background, in the background section, discuss the theoretical and
historical aspects of the topic as appropriate.
The background should start with a brief discussion of theory
because the theory may not be common knowledge for the audience.
Which is why the theory discussion
is essential to understanding the rest of the paper.
The discussion section is crucially important,
this is the main section of the report.
And it may include a brief discussion of a device and
its functional applications.
Conclusion, this section of the report normally
summarizes the report and may provide a recommendation.
Any recommendation must be supported and
justified by information in the discussion section.
References and appendix, include a list of the references used in the report.
Always list all the references that were already cited in the report.
As a courtesy to the reader, you can also list sources that you consulted,
but did not specifically use because these sources may have influenced your thinking,
or may provide additional information for further exploration of the topic.
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