Academic Writing and Report Structure

TheThe report is where the project's reasoning becomes visible to a marker. A well-run project can still lose marks if its report is hard to follow, states claims without support, or uses an informal register for a formal argument. Academic writing is a set of habits that make the reasoning easy to check, and most of them can be learned in an afternoon and applied for the rest of a degree.informal register: slang, contractions, chat tone

This page covers the register and sentence-level habits that university writing expects, the structure most reports follow, and where to find the detailed guidance. The University of Reading publishes a set of writing guides online, and they are the most useful starting point for the points below.

Register

TheThe University of Reading's guidance on academic style says that academic writing should be formal, because informal writing is not always understood in the same way by every reader. It advises avoiding contractions, colloquialisms, and casual words^[1]. In practice this means "it does not" rather than "it doesn't", and "the results were significant" rather than "the results were really good".

The same guidance recommends replacing vague descriptions with figures. "High throughput" becomes a number with a unit, and "a large improvement" becomes the size of the change with its uncertainty. This is the sentence-level version of the evidence discipline in Collecting Evidence, Evaluating It, and Validating the Result.numbers carry the weight of the claim

Use the past tense when reporting what you did, as the guidance advises: "The data was cleaned before analysis" describes a completed step. The present tense is for what the results show now, and for established facts.

Person and Voice

ManyMany students are told to avoid the first person. The guidance says that for objective academic writing the first person should be avoided, and that "I analysed the data" becomes "the data was analysed". It also notes that the passive is not always appropriate, and that reflective writing often uses the first person^[1]. Check the convention for your own course, and be consistent within a section. A short statement of your own decisions, such as "the authors chose a baseline of X because Y", is often clearer than a passive construction that hides who decided.

Paragraphs and Flow

EachEach paragraph should carry one idea, in an order a reader can follow without going back. The guidance says the order of information should be logical, so that the reader can follow the thinking^[1]. A good test is to read only the first sentence of each paragraph in a section. If those sentences form a coherent summary, the structure is working.topic sentences as a skeleton check

When a draft feels long, the guidance suggests three edits: remove unnecessary words, replace a phrase with a single word where possible, and remove the least important paragraphs^[1]. These are cheap and effective, and they are usually more useful than reading the draft again to check for errors.

Descriptive, Analytical, and Reflective Writing

TheThe Reading guidance on styles of writing separates three modes. Descriptive writing answers "what?", "when?", and "who?", and is needed for methods and findings but should be kept to a minimum in an essay. Analytical writing answers "why?", "how?", and "so what?". Reflective writing looks back at your own learning and forward to what you would change^[2]. A report needs all three, and the mistake most often made is to spend too long on the first and too little on the second.the 'so what?' is the heart of analysis

A quick check on each section: if it only tells the reader what happened, add the analysis that explains why it matters. If it only states an opinion, add the evidence behind it.

Citation

TheThe Reading guidance is blunt on this point: you must reference everything fully and in the correct way, which is how a report avoids accusations of plagiarism^[1]. Your course will specify a referencing style. Learn it early, and keep a reference manager or a plain bibliography file updated as you read. Adding references at the end of a project is slow and error-prone.

A Common Report Structure

MostMost project reports follow a similar sequence. Your course may vary the names and the order, but the logic is usually this:

1. Introduction. The question, why it matters, and the structure of the report.
2. Background and literature. What is already known, organised by concept, as described in Literature Reviews That Do Analytical Work.
3. Method. What was built or measured, and how, with enough detail for another person to repeat it.
4. Results. What was found, stated plainly, with uncertainty.
5. Evaluation and critical analysis. What the results show, what else could explain them, and what would change the conclusion, as described in Designing Experiments and Writing Critical Analysis.
6. Conclusion and limitations. The answer to the question, and the limits of that answer.

The report should be planned from the success criteria, not written last. The reasoning behind that is in The Report as the Front-End.

Where to Find the Detailed Guidance

TheThe University of Reading's academic writing guides cover the points above in more depth, and they are free to use online. The most relevant are:

• Writing in an academic style — formality, tense, person, conciseness, and the editing strategies above.
• Descriptive, analytical and reflective writing — the three modes and how to balance them.
• Thinking about grammar — sentence structure and the common errors that a marker notices.
• Correct punctuation — colons, semicolons, and apostrophes.
• Effective proof reading — checking a finished draft.

The guides are a reference for individual points, so read the style guide first and return to the others when a specific problem arises.

Related Topics

• Reflective Writing — the reflective mode, and when a first-person account is the right choice.
• Presentations and Demonstrations — presenting the same argument in a different form.
• Keeping a Learning Log — a running record that makes the final report easier to write.
• Academic Integrity — the principles behind citation and attribution.

References

1. University of Reading. (n.d.). Writing in an academic style. Academic writing guides, LibGuides. https://libguides.reading.ac.uk/writing/style
2. University of Reading. (n.d.). Descriptive, analytical and reflective writing. Academic writing guides, LibGuides. https://libguides.reading.ac.uk/writing/stylesofwriting