Systematic completion for MSc theses. Start with planning, then structure, then defend
Current: IMRAD Structure
Coming soon: Planning your timeline (Gantt) | Literature review methodology… Read more “Research Writing Foundations”
Part 1: IMRaD Sections
Part 2: How long should each section be?
Part 3: How to align your structure across sections
Part 4: The hidden structure behind IMRaD
Using this template for your MSc thesis?
Remember that examiners are looking for mastery of research skills. Which means you must be more elaborate in your explanations than in a journal article:
Even the strongest research can feel arbitrary if your reasoning isn’t clear. It may seem weak, even when it isn’t. The consequence: reviewers and co-authors start asking seemingly random questions, suggest moving information to the supplement, or request additional experiments. You might start to wonder if your study is flawed — it’s not. The logic just isn’t obvious enough.
Here’s why that happens. Throughout your research process, you (or your supervisor) make many decisions. In Stage 1, we captured the major ones: Significance, Knowledge Gap, Study Aims, Scope, and Methods Rationale.… Read more “Stage 2: Building the Foundation”
In ‘Building Airtight Logic‘ I explained what a journal article does: it tells a ‘story’ of why this research was conducted.
When you read a scientific journal article, it appears as if that story happened linearly — as if each decision about how to carry out the research was made in logical progression. That’s probably not true. Research is inherently messy. We try, we fail, we try again, and our understanding evolves as we go. Very little of this happens in a neat sequence.
But a journal article requires a causal narrative: a problem led to a gap, which led to a question, which justified a particular approach.… Read more “Stage 1: Getting your thoughts on paper”
A journal article is a story you tell about your research. Not a story in the classic sense, but in the sense that it goes beyond simply presenting data. You take your reader on a journey.
That journey isn’t just: I did this, and I did that. No, your reader wants to know why you went left here instead of right. To speak in metaphors: Why did you go to the beach instead of the mountains? Why did you take the train instead of the plane?
We can call this journey the ‘scientific narrative’. This narrative forms the backbone of your journal article — without one, the thing falls apart.… Read more “Building Airtight Logic: scientific narrative explained”
Building Airtight Logic: scientific narrative explained Read More »
Freewriting is writing anything that comes to mind; basically capturing your stream of consciousness.
It’s a great technique for warming up your ‘writing muscles’, and can be helpful to overcome writer’s block. Freewriting is also useful for brainstorming, such as when trying to understand the outcomes of your research.
Generalising, or abstracting, is restating a concept in more abstract (general) terms. For example, if you move up along the abstraction ladder1 below, the cow Bessie becomes the more abstract terms cow, livestock, and ultimately wealth. If you move down, the term wealth becomes increasingly more specific (hence, specifying).
Generalising and specifying help with critical thinking2 and Introduction and Discussion writing. Think of it as zooming in (specifying; which happens in the Introduction, and zooming out (generalising; which happens in the Discussion). For example, generalising allows you to rewrite the results of your study — which are often highly specific — in more general terms:
… Read more “Generalising vs. Specifying”We found that juvenile Atlantic salmon exposed to 20 µg/L of nitrate had a 12% reduction in growth rate over 8 weeks.
How to draft fast without writing garbage (a 5-step system for scientists) Read More »
