Importance of Appendices and References in Report Writing

Importance of Appendices and References in Report Writing

When you have been asked to write a report, you are also expected to include appendices and references in it. The appendix is essentially a detailed documentation covering the points that you have outlined in the findings section of your report, such as the questionnaires or technical data or charts and tables. A references list is always included as part of an academic report because it offers a comprehensive list of all sources that you has referred to when writing the text. Both the appendix and reference list constitute the “back matter” of your report. This back matter typically comes after the report’s “conclusion.”

Why are appendices and references important for report writing?

When you seek university assignment help services for writing a report, the assignment expert will teach you the value of incorporating appendices and references in it. Appendix contains supplementary or secondary information that might be of interest to the readers. When you have only a single appendix, you can simply refer to it as the “Appendix”, but when you have multiple, you will number them with letters such as Appendix A. In a reference list; the references of the report have to be listed by you in an alphabetical order.

 

The data which may not be relevant to your findings but which definitely supports your evaluations and validates your observations and conclusions have to be in the appendix. Certain parts of this data can be included in the main body of the report, but the full data set is there in the appendix only. So, types of data which may form part of an appendix include maps and drawings, charts and graphs, tables and figures etc. You must bear in mind that the appendix can only contain information which is relevant to the report and not the whole information that has been accumulated by you through research. An appendix will not have any limitations on data inclusion, depending on how far the data is relevant to the report. The order that you follow in naming the appendices represents the order by which they have been included in the text.

When should you use appendices?

• Appendices must be used when the data which is included in the main report is too lengthy and not well structured for the convenience of the reader.
• You can use an appendix to include some supporting information that might have cluttered the main text and distracted the readers.
• The appendix must be referred within main text of the report but these are not included in the total word count.

Need for including references in your Report:

 Whether you use an assignment provider in Australia or your write a report on your own, you will have to base your arguments and ideas on the writings of many other researchers and authors. This makes it imperative to acknowledge your sources with the help of which you have been able to draw conclusions. You need to include complete details of these sources in the Reference section of your report. This will help readers to make a distinction between your ideas and those that you have borrowed from external sources. Readers can also be encouraged to read more extensively on the topic by looking up the sources you have mentioned. So, a bibliography is the list of all reference materials which you have consulted in the course of your research and the reference list includes all references that you have mentioned in the report which are listed alphabetically at the end. Your assignment provider can guide you on the different referencing formats; each department is likely to have its unique referencing format.

 

Summary: The appendix and reference sections are both integral to an academic report writing exercise. While the appendix may or may not be included in every report, a reference list is almost always there. The appendix will let you incorporate detailed information that might have otherwise distracted the reader had it been part of the main body. Referencing is acknowledging the sources such as journals, papers and books that you may have used in your research for the report. What you must remember is that the appendix is actually non-essential data; even if it were to be excluded from the report, your reader will still be able to understand the write-up.