3.3 Follow A Model
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Table 3-1 shows conventional structures, like IMRaD, provide a scaffold for creating initial topics for your outline. The IMRaD structure’s scaffold offers the strength of generality: you can use the scaffold to seed topics for writing projects belonging to different disciplines, to seed topics for different projects belonging to the same discipline, or to seed topics for different projects from the same research lab.
However, the IMRaD scaffold’s strength also creates a problem: projects from one lab, or from one researcher, might require more focus because many Table 3-1 questions do not relate to projects from a particular lab or to a researcher who requires a more customized scaffold.
Where might you find a more customized topics scaffold? A model manuscript provides one potential source. I define a model manuscript as a paper strongly related to your research, as well as a paper you consider well-crafted or well-written. You can use your model manuscript to create a customized topics scaffold.
How do you derive a topics scaffold from a model manuscript? You reverse engineer the model manuscript along the lines illustrated earlier in Table 2-1. You work through the manuscript paragraph by paragraph, identifying each paragraph’s topic sentence and concluding sentence. You then use the sentences to infer each paragraph’s topic. Table 2-1 illustrated such reverse engineering for the introductory paragraphs of one paper. An analysis of a model paper requires reverse engineering all paragraphs in the model paper.
To create a custom scaffold, you then write a question for each paragraph topic you have reverse engineered. You design the question to elicit the paragraph’s topic. Your questions provide a more customized scaffold; personal prompts for initial topics for a paper to emulate your model manuscript.
When I was a student, my model paper was written by two of my psychology professors, describing how mental imagery affected concept learning (Katz & Paivio, 1975). I turned to the Katz and Paivio paper as a model because I admired its writing — I wanted my own writing to exhibit similar craftsmanship. As a junior faculty member, I turned to a different model paper which described a new learning rule for artificial neural networks (Rumelhart et al., 1986). Once again, I chose the model paper because I admired its writing. I also chose it because my research interests had changed, and my new model was directly related to my new research.
If you decide to use a model paper to serve as a scaffold for generating topics, then your choice of model will be personal. You need to choose a well-written paper related to your work, which you will reverse engineer to produce questions which prompt topics for a paper you want to write.
