3.2 Questions from Conventions

Follow a no-fail recipe.

When scientists first started writing about their discoveries, no conventions existed to dictate what form their writing should take. In the 17^th century, the first scientific journals published papers written as chronologically structured narratives, or even as descriptive letters (Sollaci & Pereira, 2004; Wu, 2011). Only in the 20^th century did scientific journals begin to publish articles which followed a conventional structure.

Nowadays, we expect to read scientific articles organized according to a discipline’s conventions. Conventions make articles easier to understand, because conventions satisfy readers’ expectations about how researchers present information. Scientific writers follow accepted practices or conventions to increase the grasp – and impact – of their work. In Section 3.2 I describe how an important modern convention can scaffold creating topics.

By the 1940s, scientific writing in many disciplines began using a particular convention: the Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion (IMRaD) structure. By 1965, IMRaD had become the dominant convention, and now serves, by far, as scientific writing’s most common structure (Sollaci & Pereira, 2004).

IMRaD provides a logical narrative for a scientific paper. The introduction lays out a problem, states the problem’s importance, relates what researchers know (or don’t know) about the problem, and introduces research questions, hypotheses, and objectives. The method section describes how the writer studied their research questions. The results section conveys what the research methods found. The discussion interprets what the results mean, and states why readers should consider results as important.

Why has IMRaD become the dominant convention for scientific writing? First, IMRaD provides essential structure for successfully disseminating scientific research. “Most, if not all, editors and scientists agree that IMRaD provides a consistent framework that guides the author to address several questions essential to understanding a scientific study” (Wu, 2011, p. 1347). Second, you can apply IMRaD across diverse disciplines. Not surprisingly, many books about scientific writing discuss IMRaD (Heard, 2022; Sarnecka, 2019; Schimel, 2012; Sword, 2012).

One often finds IMRaD promoted within disciplines. For example, the 7^th edition of the Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) (American Psychological Association, 2020) provides conventions for psychologists to use to report research. Within the APA manual one finds an extremely detailed IMRaD structure. Table 3-1 of the APA manual (pages 77-79) provides a long list of IMRaD components, including the structure for each IMRad component and detailing the topics and subtopics to include in each section.

For example, the APA’s Table 3-1 breaks the introduction into discussing three core subtopics: ‘Problem’, ‘Review of Relevant Scholarship’, and ‘Hypothesis, Aims, and Objectives’. For the latter subtopic, the table (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 78) instructs the writer to “state specific hypotheses aims and objectives including theories or other means to derive hypotheses, primary and secondary hypotheses, other planned analyses.”

Some writing aids provide prompts to help overcome writer’s block (Goldberg, 2021; Lamott, 1995). I follow suit by converting the statements of the APA manual’s Table 3-1into questions to use as prompts which appear (coincidentally) in my own Table 3-1 below. Answers to my IMRaD questions become your first topic cards (Step 1 in the Chapter 2 method). By giving you the IMRaD questions in advance, I provide you with a scaffold you can easily use to generate topic cards. The questions serve as a scaffold because you don’t need to keep the questions in mind; you simply look at them and answer them, jotting the answers down on index cards.

I only provide questions for the APA’s core IMRaD sections, ignoring other components (title page, author notes, abstract). Even so, the scaffold provides 104 different questions to use as prompts, because the APA manual’s IMRaD structure is very detailed. I number each question to indicate its order relative to the table in the Publication manual. I also label each question to indicate the IMRaD topic and subtopic being addressed, using the terms provided in the Publication manual’s table.

Why convert the Publication manual’s statements about content into questions? To me, questions provide the most useful prompts for generating topics. First, most scientific articles aim to answer questions. Having questions in hand brings a paper’s purpose to the foreground. Second, short answers to the questions almost always provide useful topics. Third, at times one question may generate more than one answer, and therefore efficiently generates more than one topic.

Table 3-1 below provides all my IMRaD questions. The table of questions is the scaffold, stepping away from exclusively using index cards to scaffold a paper’s outline.

However, it can be convenient to convert the Table 3-1 scaffold into IMRad format. I print my own version of the table on labels, with one question per label. I then stick each label on its own index card, creating a deck of question cards to scaffold how I create topics. To use the deck, I take each prompt card in order. For each question, I generate one or more answers. I make each answer brief – a short note – and I write my answer on a new index card. If I feel a particular question is not relevant to my manuscript, I put the prompt card aside. When I finish answering the questions, I have a set of index cards, each containing a short answer to a question, completing Step 1 of the Chapter 2 method.

When I choose to translate my Table 3-1 into index card form, I’m creating index cards which provide a different kind of scaffold than the index cards create in Chapter 2. First, I do not discard my IMRaD prompt cards because I can use them to prompt topics for many different papers. Second, I do not write on the prompt cards. I simply read them and write the answers on new index cards.

Table 3-1 which follows is a perfectly good scaffold on its own. Why might I convert it into a set of index cards? First, I can use a prompt card in public when I need a group of collaborators to collectively begin generating topics for a manuscript. Second, sometimes work proceeds more rapidly when Table 3-1 prompts are considered out of order (see Section 3-5 below). I find it easier to do so by breaking Table 3-1 questions into individual index cards.

The process I used to convert the APA’s IMRaD structure into prompts could be applied to other conventions. The example described in Section 3.2 comes from a table in the APA publication manual which provides the structure of a paper for describing a study which relies on quantitative analyses. The same manual provides another table which structures a paper which describes qualitative results, and still another table which describes a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Both tables could be converted into topic scaffolds by having their contents converted into prompt questions. Readers with interests in other disciplines can find guidelines for reporting their research and convert their guidelines into topic prompts as well.