Monday, August 27, 2012

Writing Tips #32


 Avoid anecdotal information

Sometimes you may feel the need to justify a statement or procedure by stating "'the instructor told us to do this instead of that." You might think it appropriate to write "we used Microsoft Excel to produce a graph of x versus y." Such information is anecdotal and is considered to be superfluous.

A research paper summarizes a study. It does not identify who did what. Reference to instructors, fellow students, teams, partners, etc. are not appropriate, nor is it appropriate to refer to "the lab".

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