Remembering Your Reader (Even in the Methods Section)

By Jeff Zuckerman

Dissertation Editor and CSS Faculty Member

One of the most challenging and important sections that capstone researchers need to write is the methods section. In your proposal it’s critical to describe what you plan to do and why, or once the research is completed, what you did and why you did it.

In Walden doctoral studies, that’s Section 2. In dissertations, it’s Chapter 3. Your task is twofold: You must show enough details of the research method so that the study can be replicated, and you need to show that what you did made sense and that your work was conducted ethically and soundly.

Too often, though, students forget they are writing for a reader rather than crafting a textbook. As Booth, Columb, and Williams (2003) advised, put yourself in the shoes of a reader who pleads, “Just tell me something that I don’t know so that I can better understand the topic of our common interest” (p. 25).

I used to joke at residencies that, at the microlevel, does your reader need to know every action you took to enclose a self-addressed envelope? For example:

The researcher drove her tan 2004 Buick LeSabre missing a front right hubcap to the U.S. Post Office in Monroeville, PA, purchased 100 first-class stamps featuring famous left-handed U.S. college lacrosse players and then, after tearing off the backing, placed each stamp 1.55 mm from the upper right corner of a business-sized self-addressed envelope.

Luckily, most surveys are now done online. No, your reader does not need what brand of computer you used and whether you bought it at Best Buy or OfficeMax. And per the 6^th edition of the APA manual, you are required to use first person when describing steps in the study:

I enclosed a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Unnecessary microscopic details aside, the largest chunk of writing that we readers/editors sometimes snooze through is the pages and pages of didactic narrative on research methodology. By didactic I mean instructive and preachy: the overwritten history of quantitative versus qualitative methodologies (often from Creswell), the paragraphs upon paragraphs on each method you did not choose to use, the textbook language pulled nearly word-for-word from research books rather than your brief narrative of what method you chose and why.

We get it: The rubric requires it. And your chair might want all that. For example, the DBA rubric states you must “justify why [your method] was used and why other methods were not selected.”

Bottom line? Yes, a detailed, concise narrative of what you didn’t do and what you did do is needed. But do remember your reader.

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Reference

Booth, W. C., Columb, G. G., & Williams, J. M. (2003). The craft of research (2^nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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