The problem with writing is that it’s an invisible activity. All we see people do is sit behind a screen, typing on a keyboard. Consequently, most students (and supervisors) don’t have explicit language for the different writing activities.
Roughly, I like to divide the writing process into two main activities based on two different goals:
- Building knowledge: Knowledge building; sense-making — this is writing for yourself.
- Communicating knowledge: Communicating said knowledge — this is writing for an audience.
We can divide these categories further into:
- Building knowledge
- Asking questions: Establishing exactly what question you want to answer and how you’ll look for the answer. This includes defining the knowledge gap, scoping the literature, setting methodological boundaries (which includes designing and executing data collection). In practical terms, this means drafting the Introduction and Methods.
- Interpreting findings: Answering the questions using the available knowledge — your findings (results) and other people’s findings (literature). This is the generative work of making sense of results within the questions you asked. In practical terms, this means drafting the Results and Discussion.
- Communicating knowledge
- Structuring your ideas: Develop a logical narrative that convinces your audience that your interpretation of the data, given the research questions, is the most likely one (i.e. building trust). This includes (reverse) outlining and structuring your paragraphs.
- Language editing: Writing clear, readable language that matches the style of your target audience (see also Language conventions).
- Polishing: Proofreading grammar, spelling, abbreviations, citations, etc.
Writing is not linear
Writing is more like doing a logic puzzle than following a recipe. You learn something about your findings, which reshapes the question you posed, which in turn changes how you must present the findings (x).
The phases kind of ping-pong back and forth until everything aligns. In practical terms, you’ll often find that you need to tighten the Introduction after working on the Discussion.
