Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Expectations

I don't have much time today, but here's an idea that might help you focus a paper. Write one sentence that states what your field expects you to discover. Now write a sentence that states what you have actually discovered. Look at those two sentences. Work on them until there is an interesting tension between them. That tension may be more apparent to you than to your reader, so the next thing to do is to unpack it. Write three sentences, each of which identifies a way in which your discovery is related to your field's expectations.

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