How to Do a Write Up: a Few Suggestions
Doing a write up can be confusing at first. You may not really understand what a write up is; is it something you get for doing something wrong at work, or does it has something to do with accounting like the definition you found says? Well, if you happen to be reviewing an employee's actions or are in the accounting field, then yes, one of these definitions might be what you are looking for, but for the average student, neither of these will help you. Instead, your teacher is probably looking for more of an account or description of all the research you have done in one concise paper.
Most notably, science teachers may want this information, and here are a few ways in which you can go about writing you were write up:
- Look for the patterns in your research
- Think about what the major concerns or breakthroughs were
- Decide on a story from your research
Looking For Patterns
This may be the easiest one, and least time-consuming, especially if you kept all of your data organized. By having all the numbers in a spreadsheet, for example, you could place all the information into a chart to see how the numbers act over time, rather than through each experiment individually. A good example of this is the weather, you may notice that it gets warmer in the summer and colder in the winter. This is true for every year, and you can check a graph with average temperatures for each month rather than a long list of the temperatures for every single minute of every single day for an entire year.
Major Concerns Or Breakthroughs
Let's say you were having trouble finding out the answer to a particular problem in your studies. You were either successful in finding a solution, or you failed in this particular spot and had to work to get around it. This can all go into a final write up. Even small concerns and breakthroughs are important enough to be included since others may read your write up later on and try to duplicate the experiments.
Decide On A Story
Yes, you will need to decide on a general story outline for your write up. The audience will want to know all the details about why this happened or why that blew up, but they do not need to be bored with excessive amounts of information that is not needed. The information in your write up will sound more like a story than a graph or chart of just numbers and words. You already have your data written down, you do not need a second copy of that.