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

<p>A first paper feels impossible because you are trying to write it in one pass, from nothing, in one document. It is not impossible. It is a sequence of small documents, each with a clear job, written in a known order.</p> <h3>IMRaD, with word budgets</h3> <table><thead><tr> <th>Section</th><th>Target words</th><th>Drafting time</th><th>The job of this section</th> </tr></thead><tbody> <tr><td>Title</td><td>12 to 15 words</td><td>20 minutes</td><td>Name the finding, not the topic</td></tr> <tr><td>Abstract</td><td>200 to 250 words</td><td>90 minutes</td><td>Question, method, result, implication</td></tr> <tr><td>Introduction</td><td>600 to 900 words</td><td>2 to 3 hours</td><td>Move the reader from their problem to your method</td></tr> <tr><td>Literature review</td><td>600 to 1,000 words</td><td>3 to 5 hours</td><td>Show the gap, using your disputes file</td></tr> <tr><td>Methods</td><td>700 to 1,200 words</td><td>3 to 4 hours</td><td>Make it replicable by a stranger</td></tr> <tr><td>Results</td><td>500 to 900 words</td><td>3 to 5 hours</td><td>Findings in order of importance, not order of analysis</td></tr> <tr><td>Discussion</td><td>600 to 900 words</td><td>2 to 3 hours</td><td>Interpret, compare, limit, recommend</td></tr> <tr><td>References</td><td>30 to 60 items</td><td>60 minutes</td><td>Generated, never typed</td></tr> </tbody></table> <p>These totals put a realistic first paper at 3,700 to 6,000 words, which is normal for a journal article. If your target journal wants 8,000, add depth to the discussion and the literature review, not padding to the introduction.</p> <h3>Outline first, prose second</h3> <ul> <li>Write the title as a claim, even provisionally. If you cannot write a title that says what you found, you may not have a finding yet.</li> <li>Write one sentence for each section, stating what it will argue. If a section needs two sentences, it is two sections.</li> <li>Write the claim list for the results section from your evidence ledger. Order by importance, not by the order you ran the analysis.</li> <li>Write the Methods section as a numbered procedure someone else could follow. Include the awkward details: exclusions, software versions, dates, and what you did about missing data.</li> <li>Draft each section separately, in separate files. Give each a filename and a word target.</li> <li>Assemble them. Read the assembled draft once as a whole, without editing, and note where you got bored. Boredom marks structural problems.</li> <li>Write the abstract last, from the finished draft, in one sitting.</li> </ul> <blockquote><p>Nobody has ever written a good paper by starting at the beginning.</p></blockquote> <h3>The introduction is the hardest eight hundred words</h3> <p>The introduction does four jobs in order, and it fails when it tries to do them out of order. First, establish that the problem matters, in language a non-specialist in your subfield would understand. Second, show what is already known, briefly, by citing rather than describing. Third, name the gap precisely, in one sentence, ideally using the disputes file. Fourth, state what you did and what you found.</p> <p>A useful test: your fourth job, the one-sentence statement of what you found, should be written before the rest of the introduction and then be the paragraph the reader reaches at the end of it.</p> <h3>Write badly on purpose, then edit</h3> <p>The single biggest obstacle for new writers is trying to write well in the first pass. Separate the two. In draft one, you are allowed to be inaccurate about which word comes next, but not allowed to stop. In draft two, you revise for argument: does each paragraph make one point, and does the point follow from the one before? In draft three, you revise for language: cut every sentence that does not carry weight.</p> <p>Track each pass with a word count. If the count goes down by more than ten percent in a pass, you are cutting, which is correct and healthy. Most first drafts of 6,000 words should become 4,500.</p>