The Researcher's Restart: A Systematic Reading and Writing Plan for New Researchers

<p>A plan is only useful when the day arrives. This is the compressed version of the whole guide for the fortnight when a deadline has landed and the first draft does not exist yet. It assumes you have a question, an adviser who has approved it, and roughly two working weeks.</p> <h3>Days 1 and 2: the skeleton</h3> <p>Write the paper's structure before you write a sentence of it. One page, eight headings, no prose. In order: the problem, why it matters, what is already known, what is missing, the method, the results, the limits, the conclusion. If a heading has nothing under it, that is the part to work on.</p> <table><thead><tr> <th>Day</th><th>What you produce</th><th>Hours</th> </tr></thead><tbody> <tr><td>1</td><td>The eight-heading skeleton, one page</td><td>3</td></tr> <tr><td>2</td><td>The claim in one sentence, and the three sentences that support it</td><td>3</td></tr> </tbody></table> <p>The one-sentence claim is the hardest part and the most valuable. If you cannot write it, the project is not ready to be a paper, and finding that out on day two is a gift.</p> <h3>Days 3 to 6: the middle</h3> <p>Now the body, in this order: the problem, the method, the results, the discussion. Write the method while it is fresh and the results while the numbers are on screen. Leave the introduction for last, because the introduction is a promise about what the rest of the paper does, and it cannot be written honestly until the rest of it exists.</p> <p>Work in two-hour blocks with a hard stop. Put the draft in one file, not six. Keep a running list of every sentence you cannot justify and park it for the revision pass rather than stopping to fix it in the moment.</p> <h3>Days 7 to 9: the figures and tables</h3> <p>Every figure earns its place or it goes. A figure that restates a table is a second copy of work the reader will not do twice. Write the caption as a sentence that would still make sense to somebody who never sees the figure, because that is how it will be read.</p> <table><thead><tr> <th>Day</th><th>What you produce</th><th>Hours</th> </tr></thead><tbody> <tr><td>7</td><td>Figures, with captions written as sentences</td><td>4</td></tr> <tr><td>8</td><td>Tables, with every column justified</td><td>4</td></tr> <tr><td>9</td><td>The reference list, formatted in the target style</td><td>3</td></tr> </tbody></table> <p>Formatting the references is dull and it is worth doing now: it is the single most common reason a submission bounces back, and it takes hours rather than minutes, so it does not belong in the final evening.</p> <h3>Days 10 to 12: the hostile read</h3> <p>Give the draft to someone who has not been inside the project, and ask them three questions: what is the claim, what is the evidence, and what would make you reject it. The third question is the one that matters, and a colleague will usually answer it if you ask for it directly.</p> <p>Then read it yourself with the abstract and the conclusion covered. If you cannot follow the argument from the middle of the paper to the end, the structure is wrong, and no amount of sentence-level editing will fix it.</p> <h3>Days 13 and 14: the last pass</h3> <p>Three passes, in this order, and no mixing them.</p> <ul> <li><strong>Argument pass.</strong> Does each section do what the previous section set up? Fix the order here and nowhere else.</li> <li><strong>Evidence pass.</strong> Every claim has a citation or a figure. Every citation is actually in the reference list.</li> <li><strong>Language pass.</strong> Now the sentences: cut the hedges, cut the throat-clearing, fix the tense, fix the reference formatting one last time.</li> </ul> <p>Then submit a day early, not a day late. A submission that needs a correction after the deadline is worth nothing, and the reason people submit late is that they planned to submit on the last day and discovered on the last day that the form wanted a cover letter.</p> <table><thead><tr> <th>Day</th><th>What you produce</th><th>Hours</th> </tr></thead><tbody> <tr><td>13</td><td>Three passes, in the order above</td><td>5</td></tr> <tr><td>14</td><td>The cover letter, the metadata, and the submission</td><td>3</td></tr> </tbody></table> <p>A cover letter worth sending is four sentences: what the question is, what you did, what the answer is, and what it means for the field. If you cannot write those four sentences, the paper is not finished, and you have found out with a day to spare.</p>