Help at the MGH Institute
IHP Writing Center - Help with your writing assignments: planning, writing, editing, and referencing.
Academic writing can take many forms and serve different functions, especially in the context of a graduate school program. Here are some of the varied purposes.
Your graduate school assignments can include one of these, multiple of these, or all of these (which would be typical of a paper you would submit for publication).
For people new to academic writing, the difference between reporting and synthesizing can be a tough concept to understand. Let's see if we can give you some guidelines to help you understand the difference.
Reporting |
Synthesizing |
1. Can include one or multiple sources. |
1. Must include multiple sources. |
2. Summarizes what a sources says. |
2. Highlights the most relevant and/or unique points of each source and makes connections between them. |
3. Does not include your thoughts on those sources or the general topic. |
3. Includes your own interpretations of what the connections between the sources mean. |
It might help to think about reporting like news reporting, "Just the facts, Ma'am." While synthesizing takes information from several sources in order to better explain the why or how of something.
Enroll in Bellack Library's short, self-paced online course on Academic Integrity that uses videos and written materials to help you learn to avoid plagiarism.
Here are a few additional guides and tools that can help you avoid plagiarizing.
Need to talk about percentages, statistics, or any other numbers in your paper?
