Writing it up

If you haven’t done any previous project work before, you won’t have realized to what extent the act of writing, the very activity of composition, influences the development of your ideas, your arguments and your hunches. The sooner you start writing the better. If you think about it, you’ll recognize that you need to go through three stages in order to construct a completed project document. The first stage involves adding data taken from primary and secondary sources specifically related to your topic, to data taken from your own stock of general knowledge; while the second stage requires you to turn those data into information by building an argument which achieves your project objectives. All of your efforts will be pointless, however, if you give insufficient attention to the third stage, in which you have to communicate that information to your reader in a way that he or she finds convincing. The first two have been dealt with in earlier sections; my purpose in this chapter is to provide you with guidelines on the third stage.