Writing Strategies for Provide Orientation

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Provide Orientation or provide background is a Strategy that we have seen in both the Introduction and the Methods. As seen in those sections, this Strategy is used to give theoretical, empirical or informational background about the study topic. This helps to situate the Results in the broader context of the research territory. Particularly useful is a reiteration of the research problem to help focus the reader’s attention to the literature and Methods underpinning the study’s value. This strategy may also be used to indicate the order of content that follows and to highlight noteworthy features of the section. Let us look at an example:

a. “As was previously defined, genre knowledge refers to the ability to classify features of written texts as conventions of the research writing genre.”

In this sentence, the phrase “as was previously defined” helps to indicate that an important construct definition was provided earlier in the paper and that construct is worthy of mentioning again to understand the Results. This Strategy is thus a way for the researcher to reinforce the importance of the construct and to add clarity to the Results.

Take a look at a few Language Use examples for this Strategy and note the similarity to what we see in the Introduction section.