Today in the writing course we began with a shut-up-and-write about what needed to go in the methods section.

• What does the journal’s community expect in this section?
• What do readers need to know to trust what you have to say?
• Do you need to situate the study epistemologically?
• What are the methodology and the method. (You may need to say what stance you are taking)
• Provide an audit trail – who, how many, how often, what data
• How was the data analysed?
• What ethical issues were dealt with and how?

We then talked about some possible structures for the ‘report and discuss’ part of the paper and did another longer shut-up-and write about what needed to go into this most important and longest part of the paper – including:

• How much description is required in order for the reader to understand your results?
• If you give examples, why these?
• How does the analysis connect with the literatures?
• Does the journal expect theorisation, and if so how much and of what kind?
• Does the theory frame, and if so do you need a separate section at the outset to explain this framing?

After this we worked on headings that organised this material.

A final shut-up-and-write focused on what needed to go into the conclusion.

We then looked at an article that we’d all read overnight and asked the following questions – these of course are also questions to ask of our own papers:

• Does the article address a question that is significant in the field and/or professional practice?
• Does it bring together interesting literatures?
• If it is empirical, is the research design convincing? Is it innovative? Is it seriously substantive?
• Does the article do more than describe and analyse?
• If it theorises, is it a sophisticated and informative/instructive?
• Does it have an angle that is new/different?
• Does it take the field somewhere?
• Will it be cited a lot? If so by whom?

That was then it. The participants now have to take their abstract, their road map and headings, and the various pieces of holding text produced through shut-up-and-write, and turn them into a draft.

I hope they are all brilliant.