Writing Strategy: Restate Study Specifics

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Some specific details from the Methods and Results are directly applicable to your central argument or claims about the study’s relevancy or contribution. These details should be restated to clarify important elements in the research story. Restate Study Specifics is thus used to clarify the connection between certain study details and succinct take-home messages. When take-home messages are related to methodological contributions, details about the methodology should be reiterated to lead into a discussion of how those methodological choices move the field forward. If the take-home messages are related to filling knowledge gaps, details about the noteworthy findings to attain the research objectives, questions, and/or hypotheses should be highlighted. And if the contribution is theoretical, revisiting the theoretical underpinnings that drive the current study may add clarity to the expected contributions. In essence, this Strategy is used to front any relevant information from earlier in the manuscript to help foreground the discussion to come after.

To use this Strategy for re-establishing the territory, it is important to write a direct, declarative, and succinct proclamation of the study details. Remember that at this point, your Methods and Results are old news; the readers need only reminders of which portions of the Methods or Results are the most important to the main contributions. New information should not be presented in the form of new data or new findings. Although you might occasionally include in this section new tables and figures to deepen discussion, these visuals must not contain new data, which should be confined to the Results section.

As a final point, when re-iterating your principal findings or key methodological decisions that were described earlier in the manuscript, consider using past tense verbs consistently. Here is an example of how summarize the study using the past tense:

• “In summary, we did not detect any changes in the language of trainees, at least not of the same kind as those persons studying for an extended period of time.”

Here, the key words, “in summary” indicate a summative report of the findings. Take a look at a few Language Use examples for this Strategy and note how these additional examples are also summative rather than focused on discrete details of the study.

It is important to note that the most common error made in the D/C section is restating all of the results and not excluding the less important ones or ones that are peripheral to the central contributions. That is, this section is NOT solely a summary of findings. In many cases, your D/C section may start with a restatement of a key finding of the study (BLUE) followed by a discussion of what that finding means in a broader context (RED). We will learn more about the RED as we get into the Goal: Frame Principal Findings. For now, note that too much BLUE without any RED turns your D/C section into a summary text when it should be an evaluative text representing all three colors (BLUE, RED, and GREEN).