3.5 Let Your Findings Be Your Scaffold

What topics do your findings need you to communicate?

Tables 3-1 and 3-2 provide questions to help generate initial topics for the Chapter 2 scaffold. Each new scaffold cries out to ask its questions in order, starting from the beginning and proceeding linearly to the end. However, you should avoid generating topics by answering questions in a predetermined order. Starting a writing project at its beginning may not serve you well (Becker, 2020).

A better approach for using the prompts already presented in Chapter 3 involves asking questions in any desired order. Creating topics proceeds faster if you answer easier questions first, no matter where the questions appear in a scaffold. “Do whatever comes easiest first” (Becker, 2020, p. 60). You should only use scaffold ordering after you generate answers; you can place index cards holding your answers in a position signaled by a question’s number. But you don’t have to answer the questions in order. When you feel free to generate topics by answering questions from the scaffold’s middle first, then you also open the door to new approaches for scaffolding topics.

For example, I generally know my methods and results before I know I want to write about in my introduction or discussion. So, I use a project’s findings to scaffold the initial topics for my paper’s scaffold. I generate my topics for the middle of my IMRaD structure first.

How do you start in the middle and use your findings to scaffold your initial topics? First, you generate the middle topics of your paper – the topics directly related to your findings. You repeatedly ask the following question: What did I find?

Each answer to the question generates a topic for you to write about in your paper’s middle. Write the answer down on a new index card’s blank side. Keep asking (and answering) the question. By the time you fail to generate new answers, you will have created several potential topics for your paper. You could take a minute to arrange their index cards, so the most important results come first. Arranging your topics helps you think about each finding’s relative importance.

Next, for each topic generated by answering the question above create additional topics by answering other basic questions:

• How did I look for the result?
• What evidence reveals the result?
• Why is the result important?

Again, write each answer on a new index card, and place your new cards near the card upon which you wrote the original topic which relates to your answers. Answering basic questions about each finding generates more topics for your paper’s middle and raises ideas to address when you create your introduction or discussion. Generating topics for your paper’s middle when you begin to scaffold will make it easier for you to later generate topics for your introduction or discussion.

After generating topics related to your findings, you can next proceed to generating topics for your paper’s beginning and ending parts. Because you have already generated topics related to what you have found, and considered the importance of your findings, you can now create potential topics for your paper’s other parts.

Another approach to generating more topics (having already generated topics about your findings) is to answer a small number ‘stock questions’. For a paper’s introduction, relevant questions include:

• What am I studying?
• Why is what I am studying important?
• What is known about what I am studying?
• What still needs to be learned about what I am studying?
• How do I plan to add to this knowledge with the project I am reporting?

Other stock questions can be used to generate topics for the discussion:

• What are my main findings?
• What theories do my findings support?
• What theories do my findings refute?
• What problems do my findings cause?
• What new questions do my findings raise?

Again, answering such stock questions generates topics for your paper’s early and late sections. However, by starting in your paper’s middle – by generating topics about your findings – you have already considered what you found as well as the importance of your results. Starting in the middle makes generating your early and late topics easier.