Organising your article, dissertation, or thesis

Have you ever had to write an assignment or report and been faced with the dreaded sheet of blank paper or empty document? Have you ever sat wondering desperately how to begin? Every attempt to put down words leads to a mess of scribbles or angry stabbing of the backspace key, and you are back to where you started. For hours, the paper resists your efforts to mark it with something meaningful – until eventually you give up in despair.

That feeling when you wear your lucky turtleneck, have an old-timey ambience lamp, brought a stack of notes, and still get writer’s block
Stock image: Dziana Hasanbekava/p
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The dreaded Writer’s Block.

Almost every person you ever speak to will have faced this situation at some point in their lives. Many face this struggle at school, internalise it, and convince themselves they are “bad” at writing because of it. This couldn’t be further from the truth – anyone can learn to write well. Getting started is often the biggest roadblock, but the good news is this particular demon can be defeated. The idea of the following steps is to get something onto the page so you at least have a starting point. Writer’s block can hit at any time, but once you have something basic to work with there are other strategies you can use to work through the blockage.

Not all of these steps will be relevant for every piece of work you do. Every person is different so if you have developed your own method that works for you, don’t feel obliged to change it. With any new tool or technique, your brain will need to practice them a couple of times before they start to feel natural and effective.

Step 1: The mind map or bubble diagram

How many times did your teachers at school tell you to “write a plan” before you start an essay? Probably frequently, and they’re not wrong. Creating a plan is an important part of structuring your work and a key step in the writer’s journey, but it assumes you already know what you want to say. If you aren’t even sure where to start, writing a plan won’t be much help to you.

Figure 1: Brainstorming effectively will help you create the structure of your document by identifying the key information you need to include, and in what order.

The quickest way to solve this problem is to create a mind map around the topic you need to discuss, like the example in Fig. 1. This has two purposes: it acts as an aide memoire to ensure you don’t forget anything important while you’re putting the document together, and it lets you see the “bigger picture” which will help you decide the most logical structure. To make a mind map:

1. Write down the main topic in the centre of the page.
2. Write down key words representing different aspects of this topic, circle them, then connect them to the centre.
3. Write down facts or details related to these key words and join them with lines to any relevant circle.
4. You can then easily colour-code them into related topics.
5. Congratulations, the paper is no longer empty!

Often, your thoughts will skip around seemingly at random when you create one of these diagrams. This is fine. Just write down your single-word or few-word bubbles as they come to you. If you are struggling to even put the first key words onto paper, don’t feel like you have to force yourself to sit at a desk for this stage, beating yourself up for not being able to think of anything. Punishing yourself won’t help the ideas come. Instead, just carry a notebook and pen with you, keep the topic at the back of your mind, and go do something physical (baking is my preferred option, so I have cake while I’m writing).

Something about physically moving helps to unblock your mental pathways, and if you’re doing something productive that you have to do anyway, then it’s not time wasted. You have plenty of time afterwards to think through the words you’ve put down. Not all of them need to be in your document, so don’t be afraid to cross through any you change your mind about later. Connect up the others into related topics, and start to organise them into a logical order. If you are able to use this basic hand-sketched diagram to organise your structure directly, then you can move on to step 2 already!

Others might find it easier to organise the topics if they digitise their sketched diagram first. There are a multitude of free software options (and even some online tools) that are specifically designed for creating mind maps. The first (and greatest) advantage to doing this is that you can easily colour-code your topics and rearrange them without having to re-draw any parts of it by hand. The second advantage to digitising your sketch is that you give yourself extra time during the planning stage to add or remove topics, and identify where details might link to multiple topics – these can be used as bridges to segue cleanly from one section to the next and ensure a sensible flow in your document.

Figure 2: An overly-fancy bubble diagram, created by someone who believes that making diagrams is a form of Good Procrastination

Note that it is far more productive to sketch your mind map by hand first, and then digitise it afterwards only if you need to. After all, you might not feel the need to use a digital diagram at all, so why take the extra time if you don’t have to? Furthermore, it’s all too easy to become completely absorbed in formatting the diagram and making it look fancy at the expense of letting your mind wander around the topic (as an example of this, the level of detail shown in Fig. 2 is entirely unnecessary)!

Step 2: The most logical structure

In the Sciences, as in every other subject area, it is important to present your ideas logically and with sufficient supporting evidence to convince your reader of their validity. In school, we are taught that any good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Writing in the sciences is no different. The “beginning” is your idea (or hypothesis), the “middle” presents your evidence and reasoning, while the “end” is where you draw your conclusions.

Once you begin to see writing in this way, almost every piece of writing you encounter will start to feel like a miniature story. Furthermore, you can break down your entire document as well, so that every chapter, every section and subsection, and even every paragraph has a beginning (a thesis), a middle (discussing the evidence), and an end (bringing it together in a concluding sentence).

For the most part, it’s actually very easy to come up with the basic structure of a document in the sciences. Undergraduate lab reports, journal articles and letters, dissertations, and theses, all have the same basic structure:

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Method
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusions
• References

This makes your life considerably easier in many ways. Every time I start a new document I begin with this basic outline – just to get something on the page, so I’m not faced with the mental tyranny of a big blank document. Once you have this, you can start to organise the thoughts and topics from your word cloud, sorting them into the sections they belong in. Try to give each section (except the abstract) at least one subsection heading. You don’t have to keep them as headings in the end, but it will help you to mentally clarify what you want each section to say, and in what approximate order. These subheadings can form the basis of your paragraph-level content later.

You might, at this point, start to have even more ideas for content you want to include as you review your word cloud. You may also have key references or facts you remember but want to expand on later. If you do, write/type some brief notes under whichever section heading seems most relevant. These will aid your memory later, even if you don’t include them in the final document.

Step 3: Adding some colour!

This is the most fun step. You’ve already gone to all the trouble of preparing the figures that show your results even before you start writing your paper. Add them to your document, but not in a random dump. You want to make sure your figures are properly curated, showing the important results you want to report. You don’t have to include every figure you’ve ever produced. Put the figures in the section that best fits them, and if you have a group of many figures that are similar or show the same thing, consider creating an appendix for them, so that only the first of the group is shown in the main paper. Remember that the purpose of a figure is to illustrate your results; any reader interested in seeing the full selection can easily peruse the appendix if they want to.

Step 4: Taking a break

At this point, it can be tempting to dive straight in and start writing. After all, you’ve done the hard part, right?

Right.

However, just getting this amount of words on the page is already an achievement if you suffer from Writer’s Block. So, once you get to the end of Step 3, take a break. Reward your brain for its hard work by stepping away from your desk and doing something that doesn’t involve looking at a screen for a while: do some sports; clean the house; make some food; have a cup of tea (the beverage of champions) with your friends; or even just go for a walk.

The key point here is that you should try and put some distance between your document and your eyes (and between your eyes and your computer). Don’t think about your writing. Let your brain switch to a different speed by doing something else. Trust me when I say it will make all the difference when you get to Step 5.

Step 5: Editing your structure

After you’ve taken a good break, come back to your document and re-read what you have so far. Ask yourself these questions as you’re reading:

1. Are the section headings I’ve included relevant to the results I’m reporting?
   If not, don’t be afraid to take them out now…even if it means you have to redo your section headings. This is the ideal time to do it. If you leave them in now, you will end up wasting a lot more of your time later when writing what will become irrelevant content to fill those sections. Taking an extra 15-20 minutes now will save `Future You’ valuable hours.
2. Does the progression of the section headings make sense?
   If not, change them around and ask the same question again until you’re happy with the answer. You want your writing to flow naturally from one topic to the next. You don’t want it to bounce from one, to another, and back again like an excited puppy. Read them aloud if necessary.
3. Do I need more subsections?
   If at this stage you are starting to develop an idea of how you want the document to read, you might feel like the gaps between your subsection topics are too wide. Feel free to add more subsections if you need to expand on one topic in order to link to the next. You can even start adding sub-subsections to act as paragraph placeholders! Although it’s always preferable to aim for the minimum required number (and level) of sections, they can be useful at this stage while you’re arranging the order of the content.
4. How do my figures look?
   With your fresh pair of eyes, have a look at your figures again. Have you included all your axis labels and legends? Are your plots clear and visible with sensible colour schemes? If the answer is “no” to any of these questions, you may want to fix these issues and re-run your graphs now, before you start writing about them. If you have to change them later, you may not spot any discrepancies in the text or captions by the time you do your final edit.

Congratulations! Once you get to the end of this stage you are ready to begin writing in earnest, with all of the hardest work already done! It’s a good idea at this point to show the skeleton of the document to your supervisor before moving onto the next part. If you’ve missed out any important sections or put them in the wrong order, they can help you fix this before you start writing.

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