Academic writing: Introduction and Discussion

In most cases when I evaluate student’s papers or when I supervised my MA and PhD students, the two most common challenges are with the Introduction section or Discussion.

Academic writing: Introduction and Discussion

There are tons of useful information available on the internet about how to write the different parts of an academic paper. Recently I stumbled upon one, which I really liked, especially the short version of it:

The Sections of the Paper

 Experimental process  Section of Paper
What did I do in a nutshell?  Abstract
 What is the problem? Introduction
 How did I solve the problem?  Materials and Methods
 What did I find out?  Results
 What does it mean?  Discussion
 Who helped me out?  Acknowledgments (optional)
 Whose work did I refer to?  Literature Cited
 Extra Information Appendices (optional)

See the full guide here. Unfortunately I didn’t find who the authors were. And on another note, although this guide is from the biology department and they claim that in humanities papers are very different and it might be so. However, in social sciences we follow the same structure when writing papers (we really really try to be scientific, but I have my doubts).