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Chapter14Writing and presenting your project reportBox 14.10Focus on studentresearchWriting clearer sentencesConsider the following sentence.While it is true to say that researchers have illusions ofacademic grandeur when they sit down to write theirproject report, and who can blame them becausethey have had to demonstrate skill and resilience toget to this point in their studies, they nonethelessmust consider that writing a project report is an exercisein communication, and nobody likes reading a lotof ideas that are expressed in such a confusing andpretentious way that nobody can understand them,let alone the poor tutor who has to plough through itall to try and make some sense of it.There appear to be at least six separate ideas in thissentence. It contains 101 words (when marking, wesometimes come across sentences with over 150!). Inaddition, it contains a common way of introducingmultiple ideas into a sentence: the embedded clause. Inthe sentence above the embedded clause is ‘. . . andwho can blame them because they have had to demonstrateskill and resilience to get to this point in theirstudies,...’ The give-away is the first word in the sentence:‘While’. This invites an embedded clause. Thepoint here is that potentially rich ideas get buried awayin the literary undergrowth. Dig them up and replantthem. Let them flourish in a sentence of their own.The sentence needs to be clearer and simpler.However, it should not lose any of its meaning.Halving the number of words and dividing up the sentenceinto smaller clearer sentences results in thefollowing:Researchers have illusions of academic grandeurwhen they write their project report. This isunderstandable. They have demonstrated skill andresilience to reach this point in their studies.However, writing a project report is an exercise incommunication. Nobody likes confusing and pretentiouswriting that is difficult to understand.Pity the tutor who has to make sense of it.What can be avoided is the sort of jargon that The New Oxford English Dictionary(1998) defines as ‘gibberish’ and ‘debased language’. You will know the sort of phrases:‘ongoing situation’; ‘going down the route of’; ‘at the end of the day’; ‘the bottom line’;‘at this moment in time’. It is not just that they are ugly but they are not clear and simple.For example, ‘now’ is much clearer and simpler than ‘at this moment in time’.Beware of using large numbers of quotations from the literatureWe believe that quotations from the literature should be used infrequently in your projectreport. Occasionally we receive draft projects that consist of little more than a series of quotationsfrom books and journal articles that a student has linked together with a few sentencesof her or his own. This tells us very little about the student’s understanding of theconcepts within the quotations. All it shows is that he or she has looked at the book or journalarticle and, it is hoped, can acknowledge sources correctly! In addition, by using quotationsin this way the student’s line of argument tends to become disjointed and less easy tofollow. It is therefore usually better to explain other people’s ideas in your own words.That is not to say that you should never use quotations. As you have seen, we haveused direct quotations from other people’s work in this book. Rather we would adviseyou to use them sparingly to create maximum impact in supporting your storyline.Check your spelling and grammarSpelling is still a problem for many of us, in spite of the word processing software’sspelling check facility. It will not correct your ‘moral’ when you wished to say ‘morale’ or546