Dissertation Writing in Practice: Turning Ideas into Text

3. Stating Facts, Interpreting Data and Making Claims

Although the organisation of your dissertation will depend largely on the type of research you are conducting, the rhetorical moves you will need to make and the language you use to make them will generally be very similar across disciplines. In all dissertations you will need to state facts, interpret data and make claims. This chapter focuses on how this is done. Typically, in experimental research the methods and results sections of the dissertation are associated with the statement of facts. In the methods section you tell your readers what you did and how you did it, while in the results section you tell them what you found. It is only after you have provided this information that you can move on to account for your findings and suggest what the implications of those findings may be. The subsequent discussion, therefore, moves from statements of fact, about which there can be no argument, to your interpretations, which will always be subject to dispute/ disagreement. In non-experimental research it is unlikely that you will have separate methods, results and discussion sections/chapters, but you will still need to make the same moves from fact to interpretation. If, for example, your research aims to investigate ‘The development of the film industry in the West since the tragedy of September 11th’, you will first have to inform your readers about the events of 11 September 2001 and of the relevant developments in the film industry subsequent to the tragedy. These statements of fact will be followed by any conclusions you draw about the relationship between the two; the conclusions are Stating Facts, Interpreting Data and Making Claims 70 DISSERTATION WRITING IN PRACTICE your interpretations only and you will need to make that clear to your readers through the language you use. Understanding how we distinguish fact from interpretation is very important, particularly at this level of writing. In the task that follows we look at how this is achieved. TASK 3.1 Look at the following statements, some of which have been extracted from the results section and some from the discussion section of a medical journal article on skin cancer in children. Decide which statements come from which section and think about how the language used is different in the two sections. 1. Our finding of a low melanocytic naevi in redheads is unlikely to be due to small sample size … 2. Children who had been sunburnt were twice as likely as children who had never been sunburnt to have very high numbers of melanocytic naevi … 3. If the relation between melanocytic naevi frequency and melanoma risk is the same for children as for adults, then the pattern of risk seems to be established very early in life in Queensland children in the tropics. 4. Children who averaged more than 4 hours per day in the sun were three times as likely to have high numbers of melanocytic naevi than were children who spent 1 hour or less per day … 5. It seems that living in Townsville is, in itself, sufficient for children to acquire large numbers of melanocytic naevi early in life … 6. Children who had at least one episode of sunburn had more than twice as many melanocytic naevi compared with children who had never been sunburnt. 7 . Melanocytic naevi also increased with the total number of hours spent in the sun in the year before examination … 71 STATING FACTS, INTERPRETING DATA AND MAKING CLAIMS 8. Our results suggest that this may be explained by sun-avoidance in the most sunsensitive group … 9. Significantly more melanocytic naevi were associated with light neutral skin colour compared with other skin types … and with darker hair colour – 28 for red/auburn hair, 30.5 for blonde/fair hair, and 43 for dark hair (p=0.0001). STATING FACTS The following statements from Task 3.1 above are from the results section of the article. 2. Children who had been sunburnt were twice as likely as children who had never been sunburnt to have very high numbers of melanocytic naevi … 4. Children who averaged more than 4 hours per day in the sun were three times as likely to have high numbers of melanocytic naevi than were children who spent 1 hour or less per day … 6. Children who had at least one episode of sunburn had more than twice as many melanocytic naevi compared with children who had never been...