Back Matter
The back matter of your report contains sections that give additional information about and attributions for the report’s content. It contains acknowledgments and references, as well as appendices with more data to help the reader fully understand the report’s informational basis.
Acknowledgements
If appropriate, briefly recognize any individual or institution that contributed directly to the completion of the research through financial support, technical assistance, or critique. In a thesis, this section may appear just before the introduction.
References
Documentation styles vary according to professionals and fields. For a technical writing class, you may be using either MLA or APA style, while engineers use the IEEE system. Document all secondary sources (sources created by other authors) used in the report, whether you directly quote, paraphrase, or summarize. Whether it comes from a book, article, a diagram, a table, a web page, or a product brochure—it is still borrowed information. If you create your own data through primary research (conducting your own interviews or surveys, for example), you do not need to include these on the reference list, but all secondary sources must be properly cited. (See chapter 7 for information on citing sources)
Appendices
An “Appendix” presents supplementary material that was not included in the main body of the report because it would have detracted from the efficient or logical presentation of the text, usually either by sheer bulk or level of relevance. As with figures and tables, appendices should be numbered or lettered in sequence; i.e., “Appendix A, Appendix B,” and so on.
What do you put in an appendix? Anything that does not comfortably fit in the main part of the report but cannot be left out of the report altogether. The appendix is commonly used for large tables of data, interview transcripts, large chunks of sample code, fold-out maps, background that is too basic or too advanced for the main text, or large illustrations that do not fit in the body of the report. It could also contain a list of organizations relevant to the material of the report, questions for surveys conducted, or the derivation of an equation that was used in the text but could not be referenced because it did not originally appear in a text that could be correctly cited. Anything you feel is too large or lengthy, or that you think would be distracting and interrupt the flow of the report, is a good candidate for an appendix.
