Task 1:

Look at the following statements, some of which have been extracted from the results section and
some from the discussion section of a medical journal article on skin cancer in children. Decide
which statements come from which section and think about how the language used is different in
the two sections.
1. Our finding of a low melanocytic naevi in redheads is unlikely to be due to small sample size ...
2. Children who have been sunburnt' were twice as likely as children who had never been sunburnt to
have very high numbers of melanocytic naevi ...
3. If the relation between melanocytic naevi frequency and melanoma risk is the same for children as for
adults. Then the pattern of risk seems to be established very early in life in Queensland children in the
tropics.
4. Children who averaged more than 4 hours per day in the sun were three times as likely to have high
numbers of rnelanocvtic naevi than were children who spent 1 hour or less per day ...
5. It seems that living in Townsville is. in itself, sufficient for children to acquire large numbers of
melanocytic naevi early in life ...
6. Children who had at lepst one episode of sunburn had more than twice as many melanocytic naevi
compared with children who had never been sunburnt.
7 Melanocytic naevi also increased with the total number of hours spent in the sun in the year before
examination ...

Combining Facts and Claims

It is important to note that the discussion is not always a separate section of a dissertation or
journal article. Many writers combine the results and discussion into a single section/chapter as in
Example 1 below, taken from an MPhil in civil engineering, where the writer first states one
result, then discusses it before moving on to the next result and its discussion. In this case, the
language for stating facts and that for interpreting data will alternate. How you present your
results and discussion will largely depend on the complexity of your results and whether you need
to draw on several different results in your discussion. If your results are complex, it is advisable
to state all your results first and then discuss them. This type of organisation is easier, but some
writers feel it leads to too much repetition.

EXAMPLE 1
Results and Discussion

Table 4 summarises the SMA data of the phenol-degrading granules using six individual
substrates, including formate, acetate, propionate, butyrate, benzoate and phenol. The phenol-
degrading granules were found capable of degrading benzoate. Using benzoate as the sole
substrate, the granules had an SMA of 0.244 g-COD/g-VSS/day which was comparable to the
0.23 g-CODg-VSS/day using phenol as the sole substrate. This seems to support Kobyashi's
(1989) pathway that phenol was degraded by first converting to benzoate. This was further
confirmed by the presence in large quantities of Syntrophus buswellii- like bacteria in the
granules, as to be discussed in the next section.
Table 4.3 also shows that the granules' SMS using either phenol or benzoate as substrates were
significantly less than those using formate (O.98 g-COD/g-VSS/day) and acetate (O.64 g-COD/g-
VSS/day) as substrates. This seems to suggest that the initial conversion from phenol/benzoate
to VFAs was likely to be the rate-limiting step. In the anaerobic degradation of phenol. In addition,
the phenol-degradation granules did not exhibit any methanogenic activity when propionate and
butyrate were used as substrate. This further suggests that the degradation of benzoate into
acetate was probably conducted completely inside the cell of the Syntrophus buswellii-like
bacteria; acetate was then released to the mixed liquor to be degraded by acetrophic
methanogens. Such a postulation was supported by the observation that there was no detectable
propionate and butyrate in the effluent.
1
Making Claims throughout the Dissertation
In the humanities, where there are often no separate sections/chapters for findings and discussion,
tentative propositions occur at various stages as the writer wishes to present an interpretation of
the facts observed. However, often such statements appear towards the end of a section or chapter.
Example 2 below appears close to the end of Chapter 3 of an MPhil dissertation in applied
linguistics, where the author is discussing the results of one part of the investigation carried out in
the research.

EXAMPLE 2

This would seem to suggest that knowledge of another European language did not prevent first
language features from being carried over into English. If students did not transfer punctuation
and stylistic features from French into English, there seem to be no grounds for assuming that
they transferred discourse patterns from French. There appears to be a strong probability that the
students' use of English discourse patterns reflects the fact that Arabic discourse patterns do not
differ radically from English ones, at least in so far as expository texts are concerned. Written
discourse may differ in the style of presentation between the two cultures, but the style merely
reflects superficial syntactic differences, not contrasting methods of overall discourse structure.

What is an argument?
Much of the work done by academics involves understanding, reporting and interpreting
the work of others. But knowledge is created by original research, and original research requires
original thinking. If someone is to think originally, they have to think critically and be able to
argue.
The academic argument begins with a statement (thesis) that is debatable: that is, an idea
you believe in, but with which other people might disagree. The remainder of your text provides
evidence for your thesis statements and against opposing arguments. Your aim is to convince your
readers of the correctness of your thesis by providing evidence that they will find convincing and
by defeating alternative arguments that they might have believed.

Task 2: Identifying a thesis statement

A thesis is a statement about which people can take different points of view - it is debatable. Study
the following statements and decide which are theses (that is, which are debatable) and which are
matters of fact. You will probably have to look up some of these in books or on the Internet to find
out.

Statement Thesis Factual

1 With a tablespoon of blood, the DNA of an individual can determine the
relatedness of individuals, families, tribal groups, and populations.
2 If you cloned yourself, there is no guarantee that your clone would be just
like you.
3 The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is among the most widely studied
model organisms in current biological and biomedical research.
4 We are what our genes make us.
5 Genetically modified food will mainly benefit the world's poor.
6 A gene is a discrete sequence of DNA nucleotides