Investigation - simplification

Some people are still unsure if they are "doing it right" - don't worry about that, just investigate your data, exploring what is interesting/significant because each investigation is different.

But, for clarification, here are some of the basics.

Also refer to this post from July and this recent post.

The investigation (2000 words) is broken down into sections:

• introduction (what do I know so what am I focussing on?)
• methodology (how did I collect my data thoughtfully?)
• analysis (what did I find and how does it realte to theories and context?)
• conclusion (how far do my findings support or contradict my hypothesis? overview in context)
• evaluation (how reliable were my findings, what were the significant methods and what would need to be changed to improve reliability/comparability/ethicality?)

The analysis that you are doing now needs to test your hypothesis, so it is vital that you know what you can quantify to test your hypothesis - look at the features of language that you think could be used to see whether or not your hypothesis is supported and check with me if you are not sure via email.

Then, when you've done the quantification, you should know what are the significant findings and what is puzzling/surprising. Give each section of analysis a relevant sub-heading to what you are closely examining (usually a language feature e.g. interrogatives). Analyse a range of these closely, looking for key quotes to explore using terminology, theories of all sorts and contextual factors PEE.

Keep focussed on relating the findings to the hypothesis but bring in anything else that might shed light on the findings e.g. that it's more about power than gender (Fairclough's unequal encounters) or that it is a discourse community feature rather than dialectal (John Swales).

It doesn't matter at this stage if you write things that should ultimately go in the conclusion or introduction - you can reorganise later. Don't worry - just get something written that I can help you with. There are always significant changes after the first draft.