Writing Strategies for Report Specific Results

This book is running in a long beta. Revisions are currently underway. Check back in January 2025 for updated content.

Report Specific Results is used to introduce the results of the study, addressing initial research aims, questions, and/or hypotheses in a logical order. While this Strategy serves many purposes, at the basic level, it enables researchers to share new knowledge in preparation for further discussion of how that knowledge contributes to the field. When reporting results, try to keep your descriptions concise. One way to do this is to eliminate phrases that establish passive-voice structures. When you use the active voice, your sentences will shrink, and your message will be clearer. This is different from the Methods where it is often the only place where passive constructions are typical.

Here is an example of a sentence with active construction:

a. “The mixed ANOVA revealed a statistically significant main effect for time, F(2, 54) = 53.707, p < .001, ? 2 = .499; for group, F(2, 54) = 3.309, p = .011, fip2 = .109; and for the interaction between time and group, F(2, 54) = 16.537, p < .001, ? 2 = .380.”

The verb “revealed” in the past tense is a very common verb used in Results. Other verbs include: showed, demonstrated, illustrated, observed. This is not to say that you will never find passive constructions in published articles, such as was observed. However, we would encourage you to avoid them.

Conjugating verbs to the past tense suggests that the results are products of a process that occurred in the past. We will see how verb tense changes when referring to tables and figures. But first, here are some examples of patterns that you may see and can continue to pick out for your personalized toolbox of Language Use patterns: