ABSTRACT
Our starting point is simply that research reports do not have to be boring to read, or for that matter, to write. Too often we hear the complaint that researchers write for themselves, or at most, for a small community of scholars whose interests tend to match their own. As researchers, we also know from personal experience the feeling that comes over us when data collection and analysis are over and the task of writing the “final” report is facing us. It’s as if the creative aspects of doing research have ended with the last interview, the last written vignette, the last theoretical memo, and so on. But this need not be the case. Instead, as we will illustrate in this chapter, reporting on research in the field of English Language Arts can be an enlivening, imaginative activity-one that simultaneously helps the researcher and reader interpret qualitative data in ways that begin to approach the richness and complexity of the lived experiences the data are meant to represent.
