Tips for Getting Started in Collaborative Research and Presenting Results

For some advice about how to organize collaborative projects, click here.  

Click here for a guide to what should be in a successful project proposal. 

Writing a Report of Your Results:  Those of you who are actually gathering original data from interviews, sample of prose, at least should consider reporting your project's results in some form of a scientific article format, though you can negotiate with me to adapt its format to a more MLA style format if you're more comfortable with MLA.  However, you should know that the scientific format (CBE style) will simplify some important parts of a complex report by allowing you to park your information in some pre-designed sections of the paper without having to write transition between them.  This advantage is intended to speed the communication between scientists and their colleagues, and it also guarantees that you'll attend to all the necessary details of representing your project's data gathering and analysis.  Click here for an introduction to "Types of Natural Sciences Writing," and click here for a "cookbook" approach to "How to Write a Scientific Article."  Any of the groups can decide to adapt the scientific report's "chapter"-style presentation to make writing collaboratively more efficient and coherent.  We can negotiate about how much transitional logic you need to provide.  Just remember that transitions between big units of writing are where new ideas and insights come from!