I hope you find this helpful for business (HR and project management) scholarly papers.
IN GENERAL for reports (guideline only)
- Should contain a table of contents, introduction, body, recommendations/solutions section, conclusion, reference page.
- Ensure you have included the strategy at the beginning of the paper. Everything one does in business needs to be strategically linked to the company's goals and objectives.
- The introduction draws the reader to the paper and identifies the problems and states that you have the 'magic bullet' [not the blender shake machine] without giving the proverbial cat away.
- The conclusion ties everything together and states how you solved the problem
- I create an outline with titles (like a shell)
- Within the body include the questions that were asked by my professor and start with answering the questions
- I work on the introduction and conclusion together and last
- Have a "quote" from the textbook and/or course material to support your opinion/position [scholarly argument]
- I start my papers with a quote from the textbook
- This demonstrates to the reader (instructor/prof) that the student read and applied the book to the assignment [applied learning]
- Think of including some tools like SMART goals, SWOT, PESTLE when required and to support our business decisions
- Ensure you have a reference page (aka bibliography). Please use the following website to help with APA formatting OWL // Purdue Writing Lab as well as reaching out to the Librarian and the tutor at your post-secondary educational institution.
- Appendix may be used with my course. This helps you save time and space. If you find tables, external charts, images, etc. can benefit the reader but takes up too much space in the paper you can add them in the appendix. Then you can refer to the Appendix in your paper. (example: as per Appendix A it demonstrates the different costs from 3 vendors on technical training)
- An appendix may not get marked so please ask instructors if they use/mark them.
- Consider using 'Constraints & Assumptions' in papers this helps save you space and like a 'get out of jail free card' [monopoly is one of my favourite games] https://www.phdstudent.com/thesis-and-dissertation-survival/research-design/stating-the-obvious-writing-assumptions-limitations-and-delimitations/
- I love the news so feel free to tie this in for instance Amazon is getting into the training space.
- Consider including externally sourced material, in addition to the textbook, to support your opinions such as
Harvard Business Review, JSTOR, Forbes, The Atlantic.
- Please reach out to the librarian on articles for papers as they are a wealth of information
- I
also, look at the back of the textbook (chapters) on what was used as well as other instructor's papers on what they like to read.
I hope you found the above helpful.
Anita
