[See also: How to write the background, theory, methods, analysis and discussion sections. How to write the introduction and conclusion. How to review the literature and how to structure a research paper. How to finish on time and how to reference properly. Part of the Craft of Research series. Full program here.]
Tl;dr: write it one paragraph at a time. Write regularly and in moderation about things you know for people you respect. Write every day, five days a week. Don’t write more than three hours a day. Always decide the day before what you will say; make sure it’s something you know. Have someone who is qualified to tell you that you are wrong in mind as you write. Remind yourself that you really do want them to tell you if you are. Enjoy.
“The dignity of the movement of an iceberg,” said Hemingway, “is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” He meant this both as a warning and as a promise. Do not write about things you don’t understand; but feel free to leave things out that you do. To write with dignity about war, or love, or bullfighting, for example, even in fiction, you need to have experienced these things. But, if you have in fact experienced something, you don’t need to tell the reader everything you know about it to get the experience across to your reader. The parts you leave out will still be felt as the dignity of the movement of your text. That can be very useful, and even comforting, to keep in mind. But do beware: If you leave something out that you don’t know, it doesn’t work.
A research paper, of course, is not based only on personal experience. But there is a very good place for it; your methods section tells the reader what you did to collect your data and why you did it. It is as easy (and as difficult) to write as it is to tell the truth about what you have done. In order to be credible, however, your data have to be gathered by methods that your reader respects, so you can’t just have done whatever you felt like. Your methods have to be informed by the theories that are used in your field, and you base your theory section on the literature you have reviewed. The data will serve as the basis of your analysis, which is informed by the concepts of your theory. It is because you have used a sound methodology that you (and the reader) can take your data as given in your analysis. Your concepts, which you have a shared understanding of with your reader, let you present what you have in your data as observations. These observations may challenge your expectations (framed by your concepts and some background knowledge) and this will have implications for either theory or practice. You make them explicit in your discussion section.
Already five-thousand years ago, the early Summerians knew that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are the same celestial object, namely, Venus. Some people even today may be underwhelmed by this insight; to them, Venus looks about the same when it appears in the morning and when it appears in the evening. The identity of Venus is “intuitive” to them; the Morning Star and the Evening Star look immediately like the same thing. But this is not science. At some point, ancient astronomers began to keep careful records, noticing that you could never see the Evening Star at the end of the day that you saw the Morning Star. (They were never in the “same room together,” we might say.) In fact, you could observe the Morning Star for 263 days, then nothing for 50 days, then the Evening Star for 263 days, and then nothing for 8 days. Then the Morning Star was back. While their identity was established by the Babylonians, and then re-established by the Greeks, the exact nature of Venus, as a planet orbiting the sun more closely than the Earth, was only determined in the seventeenth century, in Shakespeare’s time, by Galileo. And even to him its motion was a mystery governed by an essentially “occult” force, namely, gravity. It would take Einstein to finally figure out that it was following a straight path through curved spacetime. That explained (almost) everything.
Why this digression? Because it tells us something about what science is, and this may help you understand how to write your philosophy of science section. You don’t just need to understand the concepts of your theories, nor the objects of your analyses, you need to understand how your observations constitute your knowledge. In what sense are you doing empirical science? You are not just making intuitive sense of what people are doing. Indeed, your results may be outright counter-intuitive and still be true. What do you mean by “true”?
To write a research project you have to know what you know and know who you’re writing for. You can experience this in every paragraph you write, every half page or so of your paper or thesis. A paragraph says one thing you know and helps the reader to believe it, understand it, or agree with it. That is, a paragraph presents a particular little difficulty — something that is just a little hard to believe, understand, or agree with — along with the means to overcome it. A good way to think about this is to think of every paragraph as a focused on a “key sentence” that is then supported, elaborated, or defended by five to ten further sentences that are, in an important sense, easier to believe, understand, or agree with. If you are defining a concept of your theory, for example, you might elaborate it with reference to a text from the literature that your reader is familiar with (and will, therefore, find easier to understand). Or, if you are stating a proposition of your analysis, you might support it by drawing on your data which the reader trusts (i.e., finds easier to believe) after reading your methods section. Every half page or so, help the reader believe, understand, or agree with something you know to be true.
Who is your reader? Many students fixate on their teacher, supervisor, or examiner when writing school papers. This is understandable, but it doesn’t locate the real difficulty. Academic writing is always writing for peers, so when you are trying to decide what is “hard” about the claim you are making, you have to imagine an intellectual equal as your reader. You have to be able to put yourself in their shoes. So pick a fellow student in your cohort whom you respect: a serious, intelligent person in your class that you can identify with. Is this reader’s problem one of believing, understanding, or agreeing with you? Assume that they have roughly the same grasp of the curriculum that you have (they’ve kept up with the readings in your classes; they have participated actively in class discussions; they have gotten decent grades on their coursework). How will you explain to them what you have learned through your research? Remember here that the important difference between their knowledge and yours lies in the specific topic you have chosen for your project. Your object comes into focus against a background of shared knowledge.
So, how much do you have to know to write a research project? Let’s do the math. There are about two paragraphs to the page, and you have to know one thing (the claim made by the key sentence) to write a paragraph. If you’re writing a forty-page research project, you must, on the face of it, know eighty things. That might sound easy given a whole semester to write the thing! But note that I said, “on the face of it,” i.e., on the surface. Remember that you have to have an iceberg under your writing to give it dignity. Those eighty paragraphs are only one eighth of what you should know about your subject. After writing a good research project you should know 640 things, 80 of which constitute the paper you hand in, and 560 of which give those paragraphs their dignity under the surface. The latter will no doubt “come up” during your oral defense.
How long does it take to write a research project? The simple answer is, usually, about a semester. That’s how much time you have been given to see the project through, from formulating a research question, to carrying out the research itself, writing the paper or thesis, and, finally, defending it orally. But thinking of this period in terms of months, or even weeks, is too crude. I recommend you divide the time you have up into two eight week periods and look at each week very closely. Try to find roughly 30 hours every week (3 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon, five days a week) to block off in your calendar and decide what to do with them. Spend at least half an hour every day writing (at least one paragraph), and make sure you also give yourself time to read and think, talk (to your group and/or other peers, fellow travelers) and collect data. Make a plan for those 480 hours (30 x 16) and try to imagine actually completing the project by the end of it.
An important note: Please appreciate your finitude. I am not suggesting that you must spend 30 hours a week on your research project for 16 weeks, 480 hours in all. It’s just that a one-semester research project will usually earn 15 or 30 ECTS, which the EU estimates as a total workload of between 375 and 900 hours. With this in mind, I am suggesting that you decide very deliberately exactly how many hours every week you will spend. The easiest way to do this is to start with 10 3-hour blocks per week and explain to yourself how you could or why you cannot devote them to your project. Your satisfaction at the end will come from knowing that you made the most of the time you gave yourself.
A paragraph, like I say, should fill about half page. If you know what you’re talking about, it should be possible to write a more or less coherent one in under half an hour. So your 40-page paper, presenting 80 things you know, will take 40 hours to write. Make sure that at least those 40 hours are part of your plan. In fact, I would strongly urge you to double or triple it. Give yourself enough to time to write your project all the way through three times at a rate of one hour per page. That means that 120 of those 480 hours will be devoted to writing. Writing for three hours a day, five days a week, during the last 8 weeks would suffice. But I recommend you spread it out over the full 16 weeks. Even as you are preparing to come up with a research question, writing paragraphs that articulate things you know is a good exercise. A research question should be a “good question” in the context of the knowledge you already have. There’s no harm in writing some of that down right from the start.
If you can imagine working on every half page or so for about half an hour, you can perhaps also imagine something a little more rigorous, a little more disciplined. For many people, it can be useful to establish a routine around regular “writing moments” that become increasingly familiar. Every day, you show up to write a pre-arranged amount of paragraphs, thirty minutes at a time. You always know the day before what the key sentence will be for each of them and you always know more or less what will happen in the moment of composition. After ten such writing moments, you have gotten to know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and are now working deliberately towards becoming a better writer. Every time you sit down, you feel stronger, smarter. After the day’s writing is over (usually before lunch), you feel like you’ve accomplished something, and you are now ready to think creatively about the intellectual problems that remain in your project.
When you look at your plan, try to imagine that you will enjoy executing it. If you can’t imagine this then you might want to rethink your plan. During the semester that you are working intensely on your research project you will learn a great deal. You will come to know a bunch of facts and master a set of skills. Learning is ideally a matter of satisfying your curiosity and, like any other kind of satisfaction, it should give you pleasure. Try to design your process in such a way that there is time to feel things falling into place, like the pieces of a puzzle come together. If you have put yourself under too much pressure (usually by leaving things too late). You want your memory of this process to be a pleasant one. After all, it is the time you spent learning the things you will know, hopefully much of it for the rest of your life. It’s the time you spend developing the competences that will serve you going forward. Enjoy it.
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Further reading: