3.6 Storyboard with Images

Let your images do your writing.

Many different outlining techniques exist. For example, screenwriters often use an outlining technique called storyboarding. A storyboard provides a linear sequence of images. Each image, called a panel, represents a single scene or event. The entire sequence delivers a visual outline of an entire screenplay (Pallant & Price, 2015). While we usually associate storyboarding with screenwriting, some use storyboarding to outline other kinds of writing (Bogard & McMackin, 2012; Lee et al., 2013; Seals, 2023).

Section 3.5 described how you can use your findings as a scaffold for generating initial topics for a paper. In many cases, researchers use figures, graphs, photographs or other images to present a project’s main findings (Nersesian et al., 2022). When you have your images in advance, you can use storyboarding to generate initial topics. Your project’s images can scaffold initial topics; storyboarding becomes a special case of using your results as a scaffold for generating seed topics (Section 3.5).

Storyboarding an IMRaD project requires you to create images for your findings before any writing begins. Researchers often create images first because they use images to summarize discoveries while a project proceeds. Storyboarding works well with research which produces images before it generates writing. Once a project’s images exist, you can create a storyboard for generating initial topics.

First, you create an index card for each image. Each index card merely serves as a placeholder; you only need a rough sketch or an image name on the index card. Second, you display your image cards and rearrange them to discover a plausible narrative. The arranged image cards provide your storyboard.

With the storyboard laid out, you next generate topics for each image. As discussed in Section 3.5, you can use stock questions to generate topics. You again write each answer to a question on a new index card and place the answer near the image card to which it relates. I provide some useful stock questions below:

• What does the image show?
• How does the current image relate to the previous image?
• How does the current image relate to the next image?
• Why is the image important?

Your images presumably illustrate your project’s findings, so storyboarding generates topics for your paper’s middle. So, Step 4 requires you to generate topics for your writing project’s start and end. To do so, you can turn to techniques discussed earlier in Chapter 3: using another topics scaffold (e.g., Table 3-1) or answering stock questions like those raised in Section 3.5. Remember, the stock questions you used to generate topics for each image made you reflect upon what you found and on the importance of your findings. Thus, storyboarding provides a basis to help you generate topics for your paper’s other parts.