The Use of Appendices in an Assignment or Report -- Chatpage for European Strategic Management

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Date Posted: 13:21:14 10/11/01 Thu
Author: Pete James
Subject: The Use of Appendices in an Assignment or Report

Hi

I thought I would forward some feedback from another member of staff in BBS about when to use and when not to use appendices in a report/literature review:

�I expect to be able to read the report from beginning to end without having to refer to appendices. An appendix is where you put data from which you have drawn conclusions. Diagrams, charts etc. belong in the body of the text, not in appendices.�

Even in the case of a dissertation, you will soon be aware that you are left surprisingly little space for you to get across all the major points you wish to make. This is one way of us ensuring that the student resists the temptation to waffle. A rough guide to which work picks up the most marks is that work which is most mentally taxing not necessarily that work which takes longest to carry out due to mechanical, repetitive task such as summary. As waffling is usually very easy to do (and is not mentally taxing at all), it will pick up no marks. In fact it will probably result in lost marks as valuable time and space is taken up in a research piece which could be more valuably used for analysis, synthesis and criticism.

All this means that you will need to develop skills in summarising relevant data into a reasonably short form i.e. answering the question in the format asked for. If a question asks for a brief summary of a situation, in the context of a two page document, that summary should be brief i.e. one or two short sentences not half a page. The number of students, in one of the subjects I taught, who lost marks like this last year was remarkable. That is not to say that the work carried out was worthless or useless, it just didn�t fit well into the marking scheme of the assessment.

Your report must make full explicit and referenced use of theory. There is a lot of material available on the net but you must resist the temptation to use this wholesale. Treat it as data to be analysed rather than as definitive answers or solutions. Remember there is a difference between journalistic comment and theoretical analysis. Journalistic comment has biases and restrictions placed on it which are not placed on academics e.g. editor and proprietor bias. It is often based largely on opinion which may or may not be researched badly.

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