A quick guide to the Euro-Zone crisis.

 The ongoing European debt crisis threatens to cause a continent-wide recession, and possibly send countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Ireland into an economic depression! The International Monetary Fund and the European Union are trying to find ways to soften the inevitable blow to European markets, and thus avoid a potential credit crisis.

The earliest signs of this crisis were evident when the Greek government had to adopt several austerity measures, starting in 2008. Greece, which was one of Eurozone's fastest growing economies, was used to running large structural deficits as a matter of course ever since it gained independence from military rule in 1974.

The problem with such massive unchecked government spending was that it soon made a dent in the Eurozone's finances--the Euro was introduced in 2001. The entire region had to bear the burden of Greece's debt, the scale of which was being hidden by the country's government, who employed the services of Goldman Sachs to pull the wool over everyone else's eyes.

Soon, other countries like Ireland, Portugal, Belgium and Spain faced similar crises in light of their running structural deficits as well. Of course, the Greek deficits were by far the most severe of the lot, and they could result in the country being expelled from the Eurozone.

For now, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has tendered his resignation. Meanwhile, European leaders are still grappling with the idea of either cutting financial and strategic ties with Greece or imposing severe austerity measures in the country, with such measures drastically affecting living conditions in the indebted nation.

There are even talks of asking China to bail Europe out. This, according to most experts, should be the last resort, as it'll give China unprecedented power in the global economy! However, this could also be the only way that an impending credit crisis could be avoided.

Secondary research vs Primary research

Secondary research (also known as desk research) involves the summary, collation and/or synthesis of existing research rather than primary research, where data is collected from, for example, research subjects or experiments.

Primary research consists in research to collect original data. It is often undertaken after the researcher has gained some insight into the issue by collecting secondary data. This can be through numerous forms, including questionnaires, direct observation and telephone interviews amongst others.

How to edit a report: 7 Tips to Improve your Business Report Editing

From the link:

http://www.neilstoolbox.com/library/Business/business-report-editing.htm

1. Print it! Read it! Fix it!
Many people find it easier to edit a printed document than one still on the screen, so print and read it. If you stumble then your readers will almost certainly do so too. If you, the writer, cannot read your report without hesitating, then what chance have your readers got? Fix the obvious problems.

2. Shorten it!
Draft reports are always too long. Remove anything that does not add value to your report. In fact, nothing like that should be in there but there will be something, maybe several things, so find them and delete them. Just because you sweated blood to discover a certain piece of information does not mean your reader needs to know it. If they do, include it; if they don't, leave it out. Be ruthless about this.

3. Keep your paragraphs and sentences fairly short
Try to achieve average paragraph lengths of around 5 or 6 lines if printed on A4 paper and aim for an average sentence length of just under 20 words. Short paragraphs and sentences look more inviting and are easier to read than long ones. Obviously some will be longer and some shorter than these guidelines.

4. Try to use plain English when writing reports
If your reader has to get a dictionary to understand your report then you have not used plain English. When writing a report your job is to get your argument across to your reader, not to expand his or her vocabulary.

Replace unusual or obscure words with ones that are easier to understand. For example, don't talk about a ‘paradigm shift' unless you really have to, instead tell them about a different approach or change of attitude or process. Also, delete unnecessary words. A crisis is always serious and dangers are always real so you do not need to say ‘serious crisis' or ‘real danger'. Are there trivial crises or imitation dangers?

5. Tighten up your writing by preferring active to passive sentences
This point of grammar can seriously improve your report writing! Active sentences will usually have a subject-verb-object structure whereas passive ones have an object-verb-subject structure. Clear as mud? Forget the grammar and just look at some examples.

For example, ‘The dog chased the cat' (5 words) is an active sentence whereas ‘The cat was chased by the dog' (7 words) is a passive sentence. Active sentences are normally shorter and a bit more direct. It is usually a good idea to aim for about 70-80% of your sentences to be active when writing reports. In technical reports you may have to lower your sights a little. Here are two examples from real reports:

Three sites were visited by the inspectors. (Passive – 7 words)
The inspectors visited three sites. (Active – 5 words)
Children were encouraged to use exploratory play by their teachers. (Passive – 10 words)
Teachers encouraged children to use exploratory play. (Active – 7 words)

6. Do the obvious checks
It is surprising how many people appear to skip the basic checks on punctuation, spelling and grammar. Grammar checkers are far from perfect but they will provide some help if used intelligently.

Most punctuation problems can be avoided if you use short sentences. Short sentences need fewer punctuation marks and the grammar checker is more likely to get things right too.

Set the spellchecker to the right version of English for your readers but do not rely on it. You must also check spelling by eye. A spellchecker cannot check your meaning. If you mistype a word so that it ends up as a correct English word it will not spot it (such as typing ‘work' instead of ‘word').

In grammar, ‘subject-verb-agreement' usually means that you have muddled up singulars and plurals. Remember that 'collective nouns' such as ‘the board', ‘the committee' and ‘the industry' are actually singular and take singular verbs despite referring to lots of people or organisations. So we write ‘the committee is very concerned,' not ‘the committee are very concerned'.

7. Take a good look at it
Does it look good? Adding some white space in sensible places (such as an extra line space after sections) can make a report look more inviting.

Editing any document, but especially when you are report writing, is an important part of the production process, not an optional extra to be done if you have nothing better to do with your time. With any writing, especially a lengthy report, no matter how careful you are there will still be some errors. Careful and methodical editing can find most of them. It is far better for you to find them and correct them than for your readers to notice them and wince.

Literature Review

The process of reading, analyzing, evaluating, and summarizing scholarly materials about a specific topic.

The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It. 

Written by Dena Taylor, Health Sciences Writing Centre

Printable PDF Version What is a review of the literature? A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. Occasionally you will be asked to write one as a separate assignment (sometimes in the form of an annotated bibliography—see the bottom of the next page), but more often it is part of the introduction to an essay, research report, or thesis. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries Besides enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a literature review lets you gain and demonstrate skills in two areas Information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of useful articles and books Critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies. A literature review must do these things be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known identify areas of controversy in the literature formulate questions that need further research Ask yourself questions like these: What is the specific thesis, problem, or research question that my literature review helps to define? What type of literature review am I conducting? Am I looking at issues of theory? methodology? policy? quantitative research (e.g. on the effectiveness of a new procedure)? qualitative research (e.g., studies )? What is the scope of my literature review? What types of publications am I using (e.g., journals, books, government documents, popular media)? What discipline am I working in (e.g., nursing psychology, sociology, medicine)? How good was my information seeking? Has my search been wide enough to ensure I've found all the relevant material? Has it been narrow enough to exclude irrelevant material? Is the number of sources I've used appropriate for the length of my paper? Have I critically analysed the literature I use? Do I follow through a set of concepts and questions, comparing items to each other in the ways they deal with them? Instead of just listing and summarizing items, do I assess them, discussing strengths and weaknesses? Have I cited and discussed studies contrary to my perspective? Will the reader find my literature review relevant, appropriate, and useful? Ask yourself questions like these about each book or article you include: Has the author formulated a problem/issue? Is it clearly defined? Is its significance (scope, severity, relevance) clearly established? Could the problem have been approached more effectively from another perspective? What is the author's research orientation (e.g., interpretive, critical science, combination)? What is the author's theoretical framework (e.g., psychological, developmental, feminist)? What is the relationship between the theoretical and research perspectives? Has the author evaluated the literature relevant to the problem/issue? Does the author include literature taking positions she or he does not agree with? In a research study, how good are the basic components of the study design (e.g., population, intervention, outcome)? How accurate and valid are the measurements? Is the analysis of the data accurate and relevant to the research question? Are the conclusions validly based upon the data and analysis? In material written for a popular readership, does the author use appeals to emotion, one-sided examples, or rhetorically-charged language and tone? Is there an objective basis to the reasoning, or is the author merely "proving" what he or she already believes? How does the author structure the argument? Can you "deconstruct" the flow of the argument to see whether or where it breaks down logically (e.g., in establishing cause-effect relationships)? In what ways does this book or article contribute to our understanding of the problem under study, and in what ways is it useful for practice? What are the strengths and limitations? How does this book or article relate to the specific thesis or question I am developing? Final Notes: A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It's usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. You are not trying to list all the material published, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question If you are writing an annotated bibliography, you may need to summarize each item briefly, but should still follow through themes and concepts and do some critical assessment of material. Use an overall introduction and conclusion to state the scope of your coverage and to formulate the question, problem, or concept your chosen material illuminates. Usually you will have the option of grouping items into sections—this helps you indicate comparisons and relationships. You may be able to write a paragraph or so to introduce the focus of each section.