Case Studies

3.25. How to Write a Case Study

3.2.5 How to write a case study

The case studies you will be preparing and answering for class discussions, assignments and the exam, have already being written and compiled by someone else. However, sooner or later it will be expected of you to write a case study on some or other practical situation. This section explains how to write such a case study.

The first thing to remember about writing a case study is that the case should have a problem for the readers to solve. The case should have enough information in it that readers can understand what the problem is and, after thinking about it and analysing the information, the readers should be able to come up with a proposed solution. Writing an interesting case study is a bit like writing a detective story. You want to keep your readers very interested in the situation.

A good case is more than just a description. It is information arranged in such a way that the reader is put in the same position as the case writer was at the beginning when he or she was faced with a new situation and asked to figure out what was going on. A description, on the other hand, arranges all the information, comes to conclusions, tells the reader everything, and the reader really doesn’t have to work very hard.

When you write a case, here are some hints on how to do it so that your readers will be challenged, will ‘experience’ the same things you did when you started your investigation, and will have enough information to come to some answers.

There are three basic steps in case writing: research, analysis, and the actual writing. You start with research, but even when you reach the writing stage you may find you need to go back and research even more information.