Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:56:32 -0400
From: Joel Greenhouse <joel@stat.cmu.edu>
To: Howard Seltman <hseltman@andrew.cmu.edu>,
        Brian Junker <brian@stat.cmu.edu>,
        Trent Gaugler <tgaugler@andrew.cmu.edu>,
        Carl Skipper <skipper@stat.cmu.edu>,
        Stephen Miller <millersj@winchesterthurston.org>
CC: Joel Greenhouse <joel@stat.cmu.edu>, mark@stat.cmu.edu,
        Rebecca Nugent <rnugent@stat.cmu.edu>
Subject: MSPs and Writing Papers

Yesterday the MSPs participated in a workshop led by the new director
of CMUs Global Communication Center.  The topic of the workshop was
writing data analysis reports.  Turns out (unbeknownst to me) the
standard format that we typically encourage our students to use is SO
standard that it has a name, called IMRaD, for Introduction, Methods,
Results and Discussion.  Furthermore, people have done research on the
IMRaD format.  If you are going to have the students write data
analysis reports it would be useful for consistency to have them use
this format.  You can google IMRaD and get lots of hits.  Here are
some useful ones:

    http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/ScienceReport.html

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMRAD

Although it is not part of the acronym, the Abstract or Executive
Summary, is a key component to the report.  Research has shown that
100% of readers read the Abstract/Executive Summary, versus, eg, 20%
who read the results.

Joel