 Welcome to this ELC self-study video. Today, we are going to take a look at the findings section of an academic report. Here, we tell the reader exactly what we found. So, we've got our information in front of us. What can we learn from it? Remember what we wrote in our introduction. Our introduction laid out a clear direction for our report. And now, we just have to follow it. First, which part of the data do we need to look at? We need to think about where the important relationships are in the data. For example, if we want to find out about recycling attitudes and behavior, we would need to look at which factors seem to affect these two things. It might be things like how aware people are of the consequences of recycling, what are their moral opinions towards recycling, or simply how convenient is recycling. Now, how are we going to structure the findings? One way would be to describe and then to discuss each finding one by one. However, we could also describe all the findings together and then have a discussion. Structure one is generally better for shorter reports, while structure two is good for longer reports. Now, let's look at how to set out the findings. First thing to do is to explain to the audience which part of the data we'll be looking at. It's very useful to include tables and charts to display information more clearly and effectively. You use these, as well as the wording in your report, to describe the data to your reader. Now that we've got our data and our audience is focused, we can begin to discuss what we've found. What does the data tell us about our topic? What are the possible problems with the data? What are the implications of our data? Remember to use subheadings to number them and to underline them to make your report easier to read. Now, there are a few tricks to make our writing more interesting. We should use approximations in our findings. For example, we can say roughly one-third instead of 32%. This will also make our discussion of the data easier to understand and make sure our audience doesn't misunderstand us. We also need to be careful about sounding too certain. It's good to sound like we know what we are talking about, but in the real world we can never be 100% sure. It's usually a good idea in academic writing to hatch a little. Hatching just means giving ourselves a little room to be wrong. So, for example, we could say it will rain tomorrow, or we can say it may rain tomorrow. It's almost impossible to know whether it will rain tomorrow or not, so it's always a good idea to show our readers that we know we could be wrong. As another example, instead of saying students who understand the consequences of recycling are more likely to recycle, we could hatch by saying students who understand the consequences of recycling may be more likely to recycle. Another thing we should do to make sure our report is correct is to use authoritative references. References are a good way to show that we've done some research and that some experts agree with our point. There are other ELC videos which show how to reference effectively. Okay, so now we've got all the parts together for our findings section. If anything is unclear, just go through the video again. If it's still unclear, check with the teachers in the cell.