📗 Guidelines

PST 315: Methods of Policy Analysis and Presentation

The guidelines are the course’s how-to references. Each one covers a single piece of the work – writing a client email, coding open-ended responses, formatting a graph – and each is linked from the assignment where you first need it.

Unlike assignments, guidelines are not due on any date. Come back to them whenever you need them; several apply to more than one assignment, and most apply again to the Final Report.

Working with your client

Guideline	What it covers
Client Email	Writing your first email to your client
Initial Client Meeting	Preparing for and running your first meeting
Contract and Timeline	Filling out the contract and timeline together
Second Client Meeting	Setting your research questions

Working with your data

Guideline	What it covers
Codebook and Spreadsheet	Building a codebook and coding your data in Excel
Qualitative Coding	Categorizing open-ended survey responses
Graphing Guidelines	The formatting rules every graph must follow

Writing the report

Guideline	What it covers
Executive Summary	Writing and formatting the executive summary
Introduction and Methods	Writing the introduction and methods sections
Findings	Laying out a findings page
Appendices	What belongs in each of the five appendices
Footers and Section Breaks	Editing footers and fixing section breaks in Word