Some ideas of what to do when you no longer know why you wrote the paper & what it is about

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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Organizational History Network is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid Saving the confused paper Some ideas of what to do when you no longer know why you wrote the paper & what it is about Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM Nov 6   READ IN APP   Now this might never happen to you. But I certainly have a lot of experience with this. It might be worse if you work across disciplines, epistemic communities, paradigms or whatever you may call them. Because you are probably getting a lot of inconsistent feedback, then become unclear about what the best or most interesting aspect of your paper is, or lose focus on which journal or community best to target with your work. Maybe you have even done some piecemeal revisions at different points, and now you are faced with a truly Frankensteinian body of chopped-off, sutured-together parts (yes, I just saw the new Frankenstein in the cinema — did I mention the monster is quite hench?). Is it more than one paper, or just not enough for one? So how do you work through this? I personally tend to take a step back and try to consider what I now want to do. To be fair, I have a lot of papers that have never seen the light of day, and sometimes it is fine to conclude that maybe this is not worth continuing with. But there’s also no need to give up too soon. Over the years, I have used Pat Thompson’s excellent blog Patter a lot for advice and inspiration. Still hosted on WordPress (which means she is actually paying money to bring you a free resource), I remain a huge fan. Below is a distillation of some of her advice and the excellent questions she poses across many of her blogs, which I have found useful as exercises that get me back on track. Questions about audience and message Now this is a really basic exercise — answer these questions on the basis of your paper, and see what it tells you: What is my raw material? What is the message, and for whom? What is the contribution to knowledge? What to write for what academic reader and journal? What do these readers already know? What might these readers be most interested in? What are the possible angles we might take to frame up our small contribution? And what big international picture might we help to illuminate? What theoretical resources might we use to make our case? Can we sum up the point we want to make in a title? These questions are really useful because they make you focus on the audience and what you actually have to tell them. Sometimes, the best insight you can take from this exercise is that you may not be going for the right journal/audience, and that you need to be realistic about where your contribution will be deemed insightful or not. Here are some more questions, prompts and suggestions after the paywall… Questions that help you figure out what your paper is about You may wonder why you are writing the paper that you are currently writing. You could say that’s a bad sign, but really, it’s more a ‘tree for the woods’ problem. Here are a couple of prompts that I have found helpful when I’ve been at a bit of a loss: Complete this sentence, and test out different verbs: The purpose of the paper is to show / explore / evaluate / extend / reflect / prove / demonstrate / test out an idea /offer a new approach to thinking about … Revisit your original idea: What I want to write about… Why this? Why is it important and to whom? What is already known about this topic? What does this paper add? What is surprising / shocking / contrary to existing literatures / amusing / causes one to think? 3. Ask a question: The topic I am writing about is x - I want to ask... What should be done about the x problem What does x mean to me / the field / a particular group? What’s the relationship between x and y? What is important about x? How might we think about x differently? What more might be said about x? Is x true/right or wrong? What are the implications of x for y? Use some standard analytical strategies: compare and contrast cause and effect deep and meaningful relationship I always think of this set of prompts as being useful when the paper is really still quite underdeveloped, and you need to get back to the drawing board. At this point, you either find some answers that help you sharpen your focus, or you may decide to leave it for now — or forever. Everyone has dead papers in their drawers. If this paper is one of yours, here’s an inspirational quote about beautifully executed exits: Kit de Waal 23d ‘A gracefully executed quit is a beautiful thing, opening up more doors than it closes.’ This quote by Kio Stark (originally referring to leaving academia) could apply to a writing project. Sometimes the wise thing to do is to stop and move on to something else. It frees up your energy for new things. Can’t tell the difference between ploughing on until something starts to work or flogging a dead horse that will… 83 7 What’s the angle? This set of prompts really helps to develop and sharpen your contribution, and works best when you have a relatively developed paper that is lacking a real ‘oompf’. What does your paper do? produces a novel data corpus puts several data sets together in an innovative way brings new methods to the topic uses a different theoretical approach brings disciplinary perspectives together in a new way Some of these will work better for some papers but not others. Finding a new angle could be something like this: developing a new problematisation or offering a new insight or constructing a new argument. Teasing this out requires some thinking, but you can also start by writing down your thoughts under some prompts again. Here are a few headings to design your paper: What’s the paper about? (What is the field and the paper focus?) Who is the reader? (What’s the journal?) What do they already know about the topic? (What’s already in the scholarly conversation in the journal, in particular, and in the field?) What’s the key point you want the reader to know, a point they don’t already know? Why do they need to know this (So what, who cares?) What will happen as a result (Now what?) These can be hard questions to answer, but I would not skip them. Don’t expect editors and reviewers to be kind if you cannot answer them. Because the harsh truth is, you are wasting their time if you yourself do not know the answer when you submit your paper. Templates - love ‘em or loath ‘em There are plenty of templates, breakdowns of paragraph structures for introductions, etc., available. And of course, we all know that in social science journals, the structure of a paper is: introduction, literature, methods, findings, discussion, conclusion. But even in the absence of such rigid structures, a paper has to do certain things because it is a piece of technical writing and therefore needs to build an argument in a logical and expected way that your community can follow. They are not reading this for fun — it is not a novel. Make it easy for them to get to your ideas and insights. Here’s one such skeleton paper structure that makes the argument a bit visible, and which you might want to use as an outlining tool with which you reorganise your confused paper: Introduce the topic, provide context and background, and say why it is important Clarify, define, specify your terms, saying what you will and won’t do Connect the topic to wider knowledges, the relevant literatures, policy context, etc Report, provide an audit trail of what you did – explain your methodology and research design and its limits Illustrate, exemplify, support, provide evidence, prove – report your research results Complicate, anticipate the counter-argument(s), provide nuance – discuss and perhaps theorise your results, connecting them back to the wider literatures Extend, draw out implications – conclude your argument, offering answers to the ‘So What?’ and the ‘Now What?’ questions. Finally These are not the only ways to tackle tricky parts of the writing process. You may begin internalising these questions, and you will need them less and less. Prompts and questions really should help you develop a lot of the skills that underpin academic work, until you no longer need them because you have developed a level of mastery of the process. But until then, I have found that little exercises and challenging questions are the best way to get myself unstuck — hopefully they work for you, too. Give a gift subscription You're currently a free subscriber to Organizational History Network. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid   Like Comment Restack   © 2025 Stephanie Decker Unsubscribe