Learning

10 Rising Sea Levels

Sustainability

Step 4: Report Findings

Step 4 - Write a report where you analyse whether one of the strategies you investigated could be sustainable in an Australian context.

Report writing

Report Headings

  • Introduction – Introduce the topic of sea level rise in Australia and briefly explain the purpose of your report.
  • Environmental sustainability – Discuss how the strategy you have chosen will potentially impact the environment and evaluate if these impacts are sustainable.
  • Economic Sustainability – Discuss the economic costs of your proposal and determine if these costs are sustainable.
  • Social Sustainability – Discuss how the strategy you have chosen impacts upon the human population and evaluate if these impacts are sustainable for the community. 
  • Conclusion – Brief conclusion where you sum up the main points of your report and justify an overall recommendation as to whether your strategy of managing rising sea levels should be considered in an Australian context.    

Referencing – Use intext referencing to clearly indicate where you are stating your esearch.                                                                                       

Writing a report

  1. First, use your own ideas. It should be your paper and your ideas that should be the focus.
  2. Use the ideas of others sparingly--only to support or reinforce your own argument.
  3. When taking notes, include complete citation information for each item you use.
  4. Use quotation marks when directly stating another person's words.
  5. A good strategy is to take 30 minutes and write a short draft of your paper without using any notes. It will help you think through what you want to say and not be too dependent on your sources.

Plagiarism can sometimes be the result of poor note taking, or paraphrasing without properly citing the reference. You can avoid plagiarism by:

  • citing your references
  • referencing correctly
  • recording direct quotes and paraphrases correctly when note taking.

Quotes

When you use the exact words, ideas or images of another person, you are quoting the author. If you do not use quotation marks around the original author's direct words and cite the reference, you are plagiarising.

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is when you take someone else's concepts and put them into your own words without changing the original meaning. Even though you are not using the same words you still need to state where the concepts came from.

Note taking

Poor note taking can lead to plagiarism. You should always take care to:

  • record all reference information correctly
  • use quotation marks exactly as in the original
  • paraphrase correctly
  • clearly distinguish your own ideas from the ideas of other authors and researchers.