Reporting Results

While reading a few Gallup.com articles I noticed that although the articles are about different subjects and use numbers, charts, and graphs for different purposes they all use them to reinforce what has already been explained in text. Each article had various forms of numbers, charts, and graphs and they were always incorporated smoothly into the body text. Also, in each article there was a section at the end called "Research Methods" that fully explained their methods clearly, but like the charts and graphs this was supplemental to the methods that were mentioned briefly in the text.

Between the three articles I read it was easy to see that the trend in Gallup.com articles is to write an informative article that is relatively easy to read and then supplement the facts with necessary information. Facts were generalized in writing and then the hard numerical data would follow. One example of this is from an article about Germans' rating their well-being. When explaining that only a small percentage of German's felt that they were thriving they said "less than half, 41.1%...". Here the writer is generalizing the findings and backing it up with the verifying information. Another example is when an article talks about trends over a longer time-span the text will be a summary of the findings and following there there will be a graph or chart that shows the findings in a more visual way. This is very effective in getting the information across because it can register with all different types of readers, and by looking at the chart or graph the reader can gather the information quickly.

I found that the same approach was applied when discussing the research methods used to gather the information in the article. Usually there would be a mention of the research methods within the article; just enough for the reader to understand the context of the information. Then at the end of the article there is a section detailing the methods for anyone who would like more specific information. This is very effective because not every reader will want to or need to know the exact details of the research methods.

The articles on gallup.com are very well written and considering that most of what they are about can be hard to follow for someone not interested in hard numbers, they get factual information across effectively and in a way that is easy to understand. The reason the articles are so effective is that they explain things in a general way and then use specific details to back those statements up, but they do not overwhelm the reader by stringing tons of numbers together in one sentence. By breaking the information up and showing it in a variety of ways they are making sure that all readers will understand the materials and all of their information is factual.