The purpose of your paper is to advance your argument, which needs to explain how your conclusion builds on but differs from the work done before you. A central aspect of the writing is incorporating evidence. In the sciences, evidence can be data you’ve collected or ideas or findings that have been published in journal articles. In either case, evidence can’t just speak for itself. As the writer, you need to present it to the reader in a way that makes sense and connects to your thesis or hypothesis.
NOTE:
When you integrate evidence, it is essential that you accurately credit, cite, and paraphrase your sources.
FRAMING
Readers can keep track of authorship more effectively if you orient them to a source ahead of time. In the sciences, this orienting, or “framing” as it is often called, is done differently than in the humanities:
You should not list the title of an article or the full names of the authors, as you might if you were working in the humanities (or some social sciences).
Instead, you might refer to previous research (“Previous research found that…”) and then cite the article at the end of that sentence.
Instead, you might refer to the authors’ last names explicitly in the sentence: “Blake et al. found that…”
Regardless of the strategy you use, you need to use the appropriate citation style for the discipline you’re writing for.
REPORTING/SUMMARIZING
Deciding what evidence to present and how much detail to use is a challenging part of writing a paragraph. There is no rule about how much or how little detail to provide. The level of detail depends on the purpose of the paragraph.
On the one hand, you should not rehash every detail from a previously published source or list every piece of data you collected. Your goal should be to make sure that the details you include are relevant to the specific purpose of your paper.
On the other hand, if you provide too little detail, the reader may not appreciate how your reasoning builds on the evidence.
When building on findings from other sources, you have to decide whether you need only a concise report of the source’s findings or whether you need to include the interpretation of those findings or information on the methodology they used in their studies.
INTERPRETING
Whether the evidence you are using is data you’ve collected or material from previously published sources, evidence does not speak for itself. You need to analyze it. In other words, you need to interpret it so that readers understand how you want them to think about the evidence and how it relates to the purpose of your paper. Even if it seems obvious to you, it likely isn’t obvious to someone who doesn’t have access to your internal thought process.