Page 310 - English for Writing Research Papers

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Very important: Whatever structure you use, throughout your results section you

MUST make it clear when you are talking about your findings and not the fi ndings
of others. To learn about this extremely important aspect see Chapter 7 .

17.3 How should I begin the Results?

There are two typical ways to begin the Results. The first is to give a general pan-
orama of your surveys, experiments etc. without repeating the details you gave in
the Methods section, as in the three examples below:

Overall, the results presented below show that …
The three key results of this empirical study are: …

The following emergent themes were identified from the analysis: …
The most common way is to simply go directly to your results, often by inviting

readers to look at one of your figures or tables, either in the first sentence or very

shortly after:
Figure 1 shows the mass spectra obtained from an analysis of the two residues. The fi rst residue
reveals a .. (Fig. 1a)

A total of 34 wheat genotypes (Table 1) were screened for … Responses to increased sunlight
varied significantly (Figure 1) …

An analysis was made to look for … To do this, the average times of x and y were compared …
Figures 1–3 show the differences between …

17.4 What tenses should I use when reporting my Results?
Your results are things that you found before you started writing the paper. They
therefore relate to past events, consequently the past simple is used to report them,
often in a mixture of the active and passive forms.

You may occasionally wish to use the present simple . This is the case when you
are taking the reader through your results as if you were a professor at the white-
board and your reader was a student in the class. If you opt for this style, which –
where possible I would avoid, it needs to be absolutely clear that you are talking
about your own results and not someone else’s (see Chapter 7 ).