Why you need a braindump
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. Even if this is not how the research unfolded in real time, it should be presented as if it did.
Writing therefore asks a specific question: what needs to appear as coming first, even if nothing came first in your head? That translation is tricky. You’re moving from messy cognition to a clean narrative that acts as if everything happens in orderly fashion.
A common pitfall is believing that you must immediately come up with a polished narrative when you set pen to paper — or fingers to keyboard. It’s not surprising that this happens, because we often only see the finished end-product of published journal articles, not the messy in-betweens. But we need those messy in-betweens.
Trying to push a clean narrative straight out of the chaotic thoughts in your head is hard; it requires a tremendous amount of working memory, that most of us don’t have. Because you must juggle multiple ideas, thoughts, findings at the same time, and try fitting them into a linear progression.
It’s easier to dump the chaotic ideas first. Once they’re written down on a page, we can use that as an external working memory. That way, we can create order in chaos without mistaking messiness for failure. So let’s get started.
What thoughts should you capture?
You may wonder: I don’t even know what I’m supposed to think about. Or you may already have a rough sense. Either way, the goal for now is not to invent new ideas, but to recover the reasoning that inspired your work.
A journal article has two narrative anchors: the beginning and the end, i.e. the Introduction and the Discussion. The Introduction explains why the study exists and why it took the form it did; the Discussion reflects on what the findings mean in light of that starting point. Because the Introduction sets up everything that follows, it is usually easiest to start there. We will look into developing the Discussion in Stage 3.
Capturing research decisions
Throughout your research process, you (or your supervisor) take many decisions. Choosing a research topic, deciding what questions to answer, how to design your experiments. Together, they form the causal backbone of the scientific narrative. When readers feel that a paper “makes sense,” it is usually because these decisions are clearly articulated and logically connected.
Roughly speaking, most journal articles rely on five core decisions that must line up logically for the story to work. You can usually find them embedded in the Introduction or the start of the Methods:
- Significance: the broader (societal) problem or (scientific) knowledge gap this study aims to address
- Knowledge gaps: the specific missing pieces of knowledge that made you want to carry out this research
- Research questions (i.e. study aims): the specific research you decided to conduct
- Scope: what you — intentionally — didn’t study
- Methods Rationale: why you used specific variables/approach/location/methodology/etc.
Keep in mind that at this stage, you don’t need to build a perfect causal backbone. If you’re already at the point of writing a journal article, you have likely made these decisions during your research. The goal now is not to develop them further — you ‘simply’ need to capture them.
Brainstorming your Introduction with writing prompts
One helpful technique to capture these decisions is generative writing. Generative writing uses targeted prompts to offload ideas onto the page without worrying about structure, precision, or polish. The goal is not clarity, but recall.
Generative writing
In generative writing, you use a writing prompt to write a lot of words about a specific topic. These words don’t have to make perfect sense; it just fires up the associative machinery in your brain and helps you think back about why you carried out the research.
Here are five prompts you can use to capture all the ideas that come up when you think through the five research decisions listed above:
- Why does this study exist?
Why was this research done at all? Why this topic, and what larger gap, problem, uncertainty, or poorly understood area in the field was it meant to contribute to? - What was missing before this study?
Before this work was done, what specific thing was still unknown, unclear, or untested within that larger problem? - What did this study aim to learn or establish?
What exactly was this study trying to determine, test, or clarify? Finish the sentence: “This study asks what / whether / how / to what extent …” - What did this study not attempt to cover?
What related questions or directions were intentionally left out of this paper, even if they are part of the broader project or field? - Why was this approach appropriate?
Why was this particular approach chosen for this study? What made it a reasonable or practical way to address the question, given the constraints?
Tip: Write more than you think you need. Repetition and contradiction are actually helpful at this stage.
Note: in a perfect world, you’ve already captured all your research decisions in a lab notebook or research log. However, most of us don’t live in a perfect world and have to reconstruct things after the fact. That’s normal. As you become a more experienced researcher, you start becoming more aware of the need to capture these decisions early on.
Common culprits
There are some common challenges involved, but often they don’t become apparent until later, as they are related to skipping steps in this stage.
At this stage, mistakes usually don’t come from sloppiness, but failing to capture the key decisions that form the backbone of your narrative. Because the Introduction is meant to show why the study exists and why it took the form it did, missing or unclear decisions make it hard to see the story. This can slow down your writing later. Typical issues are:
- Unclear Significance or Knowledge Gaps: Without a clear “why this matters” or “what was missing,” the story of your study is weak, and people may be less inclined to read your study.
- Vague Research Questions: Overly broad questions can lead to a rambling discussion that’s all over the place; overly narrow questions lead to weak Discussion that reads like thin summary of the Results section.
- Undefined Scope: This can cause issues with co-authors or reviewers later on, who think the paper is about something different than you intended.
- Unstated Methods Rationale: Without this, the link between your questions and results can feel unjustified, and reviewers may question your approach.
Having said that, this doesn’t mean you should spend days trying to perfectly capture each decision. The purpose of Stage 1 is to externalise the messy thinking and lay the groundwork for the story. Making these decisions visible, even imperfectly, creates a structure that helps to organise your ideas later on. The mess is part of the process, not a failure.