Writing and communicating research · Lesson 1 of 3

What each section is actually for

Each section answers one of the reader's questions. A literature review organised by source has not answered its one.

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A research write-up has a standard shape because it answers a reader's questions in the order they arise. Knowing the job of each section stops you writing the same content three times.

Introduction — what the question is and why it is worth answering. It ends with the question stated plainly.

Literature review — what is already known and where the gap is. Its job is to make your question inevitable. It is an argument, not a list of everything you read: a review that summarises 40 papers in sequence has not done the work, because the reader still has to find the pattern themselves.

Methodology — what you did, in enough detail to be repeated, and why that was a reasonable way to answer the question. The reasoning is the part most often omitted.

Results — what you found, without interpretation. Discipline here is what lets a reader form their own view before hearing yours.

Discussion — what it means, how it relates to existing work, what is uncertain. This is where interpretation belongs, and it should be visible as interpretation.

Limitations — what your work cannot support.

Conclusion — what the reader should take away, proportionate to the evidence.

The most common structural failure is results and discussion bleeding into each other, so a reader cannot tell what was observed from what was concluded. That is module 01's fact-versus-interpretation distinction, appearing as a formatting problem.

See it happen

Your literature review is eleven pages summarising 40 papers, one after another.

The read that arrives on its own

It is comprehensive and shows you have read the field, which is what a literature review is for.

The same situation, with this idea

You ask what the reader can do with it. They can see you read 40 papers; they cannot see what the field collectively believes, where it disagrees, or why your question follows. Restructured around three or four claims — what is established, where the disagreement is, what nobody has looked at — the same 40 papers become evidence inside an argument, and your question arrives as the obvious next step.

After this, you can

organise a review around claims rather than around sources.

The takeaway

Each section answers one of the reader's questions. A literature review organised by source has not answered its one.

Easy to take the wrong way

That the standard structure is rigid. Fields vary considerably — the underlying questions are constant even when the headings are not.

Try this

Write one sentence stating the job of each section in your own write-up. Any section you cannot write a job for probably does not have one.