On Thursday, I’m going to be holding a talk about how to structure a research paper. In preparation, I thought it would be a good idea to write a sort of prose outline of the talk, summarizing the function of each section of a paper in a few simple sentences.
In the introduction you evoke a world, invoke a science, and propose a thesis. You present a familiar but interesting context for your study, frame it with a standing consensus or ongoing controversy in your field, and state a conclusion, based on your research, with significant practical or theoretical implications.
In the background section you inform the reader about the practical context of your research question. You provide the reader with the references to the most reliable public sources that you are aware of, so that the reader may become as knowledgeable as you are about the conditions from which your research object emerges.
In the theory section you tell the reader what you expected of your object of analysis before your did your research. Or, perhaps better, you remind the reader what the reader would have expected your analysis to show if you hadn’t already told them in the introduction. Alternatively, you shape the reader’s curiosity about your object, their curiosity about what your data will reveal, about how the data will support your thesis.
In the methods section you explain what you did to collect your data and why you did it that way. The aim is to win the reader’s trust, respecting their natural skepticism and awareness of typical sources of error.
In the analysis section, you present your data in a way that either challenges the reader’s expectations or satisfies the reader’s curiosity. You offer your interpretation of the data, supported by the observations you have made.
In the discussion section, you explicate the implications of your analysis for either theory or practice (or in some cases both). Now that we believe your results (having seen the data you gathered by a trusted method) what changes to our ways of seeing (our theories) or our ways of doing (our practices) are we rationally committed to? How ought we to proceed from here? What can reasonably be asked of us?
In the conclusion you restate your thesis plainly and simply, with all the presumptuousness your theory allows you and all the confidence your method affords you. And you return the reader to the world or the science with which you began, set in a slightly different light and given a slightly different weight.
A typical research paper in the social sciences is about 8000 words long and consists of about 40 paragraphs, each stating a single claim. Since each paragraph consists of less than 200 words and takes about a minute to read, it should be possible to read a paper reasonably carefully in about three quarters of an hour. For comparison, this post is 500 words and should take you two or three minutes to read.
Scholarly composition is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. I hit on this definition this morning after mulling over some variations on my standard definition last night. “Academic writing,” I normally say, “is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people.” I’ve never liked the way I use the word “writing” in my definition of a kind of writing. It’s a minor point because its circularity isn’t very vicious. Most people will grant that I’m defining mainly the adjective “academic”, not writing itself, but I still find the repetition inelegant. This new version solves that problem nicely.
Along the way, I came up with another one that I also like: Academic writing is the art of composing and arranging paragraphs about what you know for other knowledgeable people. This one has the advantage of encapsulating in a single sentence my entire approach to writing instruction. It focuses our attention on the paragraph. There are also a couple of other nice details. By saying “about what you know” instead “writing down what you know” I’m making it clear that I think academic writing is largely representational. It is about something, namely, your knowledge of the facts, which I can then go on to discuss. I also like the way it analyses “writing” into the problems of “composition” and “arrangement”. I’ve written about this before as well.
With these two definitions in mind, I think I’m ready to return to the book I started this summer and complete my revisions. I think it’s going to be quite good.
I use the iceberg metaphor quite a bit when talking about academic writing. “The dignity of the movement of an iceberg,” said Hemingway, “lies in only one eighth of it being above water.” This is generally taken to suggest that we should leave some things unsaid in our writing, but Hemingway was quite clear that it also means we should have a great deal under the surface. The key isn’t just to write less than you know; it is to know more than you write.
For Hemingway, the essential thing was to have the relevant experiences. If you were going to write about war, bullfighting, or love, you should have some experience with war, bullfighting, or love. The dignity of your writing depends on those experiences. But in academic writing, experience is not required in the same way, or, perhaps better, experience is not enough. The essential thing in an academic context is to be knowledgeable about your subject, not merely experienced. That means that the iceberg beneath your writing is somewhat more complex.
Experience does play an important role but in a different way than Hemingway proposed. The part of a research paper or dissertation that is most directly informed by actual or “lived” experience is your methods section, which tells the story of what you did to collect your data and why you did it that way. Writing it is mostly a matter of being honest about how you converted what Thomas Kuhn (following William James) called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of experience into “data” — how you turned the things that are just lying around casually, if you will, into serious, empirical objects ready to be analyzed. This sort of writing isn’t easy, of course, but it’s a place where you can feel your authority (your status as an “author”) most naturally. It’s a good place to find your voice. Just try really explaining how you collected your data and what problems you encountered in doing so. Why do you trust these data? Why should your reader? Tell the story in that spirit — always honestly, of course — and you will give yourself an occasion to improve your writing quite directly. There’s no knowledge problem here. You know what you did.
But you don’t make methodological decisions in a vacuum. You don’t just do whatever you feel like doing. You try to do things in ways your reader will respect, and you get a sense of what your reader demands by reading other writers. This gets us to another portion of the iceberg under the surface of your writing: the scientific literature. This literature doesn’t inform your methods section directly but it does shape the experiences (and decisions) you write about in your methods section. So you will of course cite it as needed even there. The bulk of your references to “the literature”, however, will be found in your theory section (and sometimes an actual literature review) which is where you provide a framework within which the reader is to make sense of your analysis (and, indeed, your methodological decisions). You are setting up your readers’ expectations.
Hopefully, you can sense the balance that I’m trying to suggest here. The mass of your iceberg is centered, under the surface, on the experiences you had collecting your data, which are shaped by your reading of the scientific literature. These three components (literature, experience, data) in turn support, above the surface, your theory, methods, and analysis sections (respectively). Much of the “scientific” or “academic” content of your paper or dissertation is determined by how you do this work and how you write this prose. But that is not all.
You will often have to give your reader background information about the company, country, region, product, industry, or practice that you are studying. Though your reader is a “peer”, and therefore familiar with your theories and methods, there is much about your empirical object that will be new to them. You must tell them what you know and you must do so on the basis of publicly available documents (newspapers and magazines, company reports and press releases, government reports and official statistics) that confirm what you are saying. You want to put your reader in the same confident position to assert these facts that you enjoy.
But scholarly writing, finally, isn’t just based on reading and experience. You have to do a great deal of thinking, reasoning. So does your reader. And this will become apparent especially in the discussion section of your paper, where you make the implications of your results explicit. Here you are not (usually) introducing new sources or new information (and certainly not new data points) to your reader, you are merely noting the (logical) consequences of granting the correctness of what you’ve been arguing so far. These consequences may be practical or theoretical — they may propose changes to the way we do things or the way we see them — but they should always be reasonable. Ideally, the reader should have been able to think of them themselves. You’re just saving them the trouble.
“A writer’s problem does not change,” said Hemingway. “He himself changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.” Like I say, in academic or scholarly writing the problem is slightly different, but the idea of “projection” is an apt one. The reader of a short story has to square the events with their experience of living in the world. The reader of a research paper has to square the results with their knowledge of the facts as they are. The paper has to make the result (a “truth” of sorts) part of the reader’s knowledge by the end of the reading. In your writing, you can only ever show your readers the surface of what you know; it’s what they imagine you have beneath the surface that counts.
The Craft of Research Series starts this week, as many students are beginning to think about their final projects, due this summer. Some are doing their first-year projects; some are doing their master’s theses. Some are already well on their way, and some still need to get properly started. I thought I’d say a few words about that this morning.
It is common to suggest you begin with a question. But another way, which amounts to the same thing, is to begin with what you know and what you don’t know. A question always presumes a great deal of prior knowledge and some limit to it, or gap in it. You can’t wonder what caused the failure of Lehman Brothers without knowing that it failed and, usually, a little something about what kind of failure it was. The meaning of the question simply depends on the knowledge you already have about the firm and, no doubt, the global financial crisis it was embroiled in. You should begin with this meaning, this understanding that suggests an inquiry. Maybe a better word for this is curiosity. That’s as good a place to begin as any.
You should also take stock of your resources. Begin with how much time you have. Don’t think in terms of months or even days or weeks. Try to get a realistic sense of how many hours you’re going to put into this project. Include the theories and methods you’ve already learned among your resources, along with some sense of your own intellectual abilities. How much can you expect to learn in the hours you’ve given yourself? Will you need to develop new (qualitative or quantitative) analytical skills? How much reading will you have to do? How long will it take to collect the data you need? Go back to your question and make sure that you will be able to answer it in time.
Also, and I can’t stress this enough. Find an opportunity for pleasure in doing your project; once you have found it, don’t be ashamed of it. Much of this has to do with being genuinely curious about the answer, not just vaguely anxious about your grade. But it also has to do with appreciating the aesthetic dimension of research. Maybe you like reading. Make sure there is time for that. Maybe you like writing. Definitely, make sure there is time for that. But you might also enjoy conducting interviews or observerving people or drawing graphs or doing calculations or running simulations or writing code. Make sure you approach your question in terms that afford you opportunities for such pleasure.
About a year ago I had an epiphany that, I think, can bring all this together. Our methodologies are always rooted in personal, lived experience. At the end of the day, the methods section of our paper simply describes, as honestly as we can, what we did and why we did it. In an important sense, it is a story told from experience. So begin where you are, with the questions and skills and resources that you have, and then embark on investigation — an adventure, if you will — that will become the story you will tell in your paper or thesis. Try to imagine the journey and set yourself some goals along the way — some experiences you want to have. Like any journey, it’s not going to turn out exactly as you imagine. But you have to begin somewhere and your own imagination isn’t a bad place to start.
To me, this is the original meaning of “master class”. I discovered it over a decade ago, and it has subtly shaped my writing instruction ever since. I don’t, of course, presume to be a “master” at anything like Segovia’s level. The range of my humor and the depth of my wisdom about scholarly writing is nowhere near his on the matter of playing the guitar. I imagine that the writers who come to see me are correspondingly less ambitious, though I sometimes have to remind myself and my students that I am not really an accomplished scholar at all. Still, this form of instruction seems to work when I do it. Maybe what I lack in humor and wisdom, I make up for in a vaguely Socratic irony. I know, at least, what I don’t know.
“As far as practice and suffering are concerned,” said Roland Barthes, “any writer can be compared to the greatest.” (He was talking about whether one could compare Philippe Sollers to Marcel Proust.) The master class gives me access, not just to a writer’s text, which may then be “corrected”, but to their practice and suffering, which may be disciplined. As writers, we cannot avoid suffering, but I like to think we can make it more precise. This is best done by direct engagement.
But unlike the playing of Segovia’s students, another’s writing can’t happen right in front of us in real time. You can’t tell how good a writer is, nor where their writing can be improved, by watching them work for a few minutes. That simply isn’t how writing works. On the other hand, you can’t simply point out errors of grammar and punctuation in a draft that they’ve spend the past week writing either. (That approach has, thankfully, been pretty widely rejected by writing teachers long ago.) Our instruction needs to bring together what Robert Graves called “the huge impossibility of language” with what I might call the “appreciable finitude of writing”.
To do this, I require participants in my master classes to bring a well-formed paragraph that has been written during a deliberate writing moment. I imagine Segovia expected that his students had practiced something — were “working on something” as it were — in the days leading up to their meeting. The session begins with them playing it as well as they can. Likewise, I expect my students to have written several paragraphs in the days and weeks before they attend the master class. The key sentence and its rhetorical posture had been decided in advance, and the writer has spent 27 minutes composing at least six sentences and at most 200 words to overcome the difficulty that they expect the reader to experience during one minute of their deliberate attention. Having written several such paragraphs (having “practiced”) they select one to bring the master class (where they will “suffer”).
The important thing is that I can now assume that I have before me the product of one deliberate attempt to say one intended thing. I can engage with it directly. First, I read it out loud, straight off the page, having never seen it before, to show the writer how hard or easy that is to do (for a academically literate reader and native speaker of English). I then try to identify the key sentence (the writer knows which sentence they’re hoping I pick) and determine whether it is being supported, elaborated, or defended (the writer, again, was presumably trying to do one of these things, with some exceptions). All the while I’m thinking out loud and moving words around to show what I mean. I even draw on the other participants to get multiple points of view on the same text, multiple readings. Sometimes I make some cryptic remark about “nuance” or “style”. The writer is supposed to sit quietly and take it all in. After 13 minutes (usually) I stop. We then move on to the next participant, another paragraph.
I don’t do a lot of language editing in these master classes, except where things are easy to fix and make the rest of the work go more smoothly. And I don’t ever suggest that I am correcting or even improving the text. That is for the writer to decide on their own. All I can do is reveal the contingencies in the composition, the fact that the paragraph could have been written differently. That, I’m told, is also the value of the experience to those who have tried it. To steal a line from the Segovia, I try to impart “a delicate lack of respect” for the grammar and focus on the possibilities of meaning instead. What participants get is not a judgment of their work but a very explicit experience of being read. “Writing as freedom,” said Barthes, “is perhaps the most explicit in history.” A master class provides an occasion to become, perhaps not “great”, but at least better, through a moment’s suffering, followed by many moments of subsequent practice.
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If you’re curious, you can experience my master classes as part the four-week Writing Process Re-engineering self-study course.
