Dividing your report into chapters

Now that you know the audience and purpose of your report, you need to structure it. The research you have done should be presented to the readers in a comprehensible and orderly fashion. This will aid a casual reader to quickly find the information he (or she) is looking for. For a thorough reader, the structure of your report will help to keep track of the bigger picture.

As seen in the template, your report should contain the following text chapters:

• Summary,
• Introduction,
• Several core chapters (these form the main text body),
• Conclusions,
• (One or more appendices).

In this section, we will focus on the core chapters. The other chapters will be discussed in sections 4.3 and 4.5

Core chapters

The core chapters form the backbone of your report. In these chapters, you will carefully explain the modelling work you have done. All details necessary to understanding your modelling process ought to be included. Your reader should be able to replicate your work, based on the information you have provided. Your conclusions should be fully supported by the information in these core chapters.

The report is meant to be a reflection of your modelling process. This means that its focus should not just lie on the final result, or the final model you have used. Instead, you should document the modelling cycles you went through while improving your model. This will give your report a chronological structure. (A scientific article, on the other hand, would be more concise and focus on the final model and results.)

The separate modelling cycles you go through provide one natural way to divide your main text body into chapters. Each chapter can describe one modelling cycle. If some cycles include much more work than others, it might also work to divide one cycle over several chapters, or perhaps to combine two cycles into one chapter if they share a similar focus.

To help your readers make sense of your chapter division, they need to have informative titles. The title “Modelling cycle 2” gives absolutely no information. A title like “Adding a predator to the aquarium” is much more informative, and helps a reader to decide whether or not this chapter will contain useful information for him.

Additionally, each chapter should have its own short chapter introduction, explaining its purpose and content. At the end of the chapter, a short chapter conclusion should summarize the results that have been found.