Writing Checklist

General

• It can be helpful to find papers that you like or are similar, especially in a target journal, and find super clear and model your formatting/language after those papers.
  • Intro - Where do they state the knowledge gap? How is the intro organized? How soon do they mention the study species? How do they emphasize what is novel about their approach?
  • Discussion - How do they start the discussion? How do they structure it? What kinds of studies do they compare and contrast to? How repetitive are they of the results? Do they cite figures again?

Introduction

Methods

Results

• Be prepared to go through 100 different versions of your figures. It’s not just Katie (pers. comm. MLA).

Discussion

• Restate thesis/question at beginning of discussion. Summarize the results without being too repetitive of the technical results, but you don’t have to interpret them yet. It’s OK to repeat things from the intro.
• Avoid reciting figures again in the discussion, unless citing a new conceptual/summary figure. There are different philosophies on this, but in E&E most of us were trained to avoid it.
• If there are debates or major reviews on the subject, make sure to summarize them again
• Start each paragraph with a topic sentence describing the theme of the paragraph. If the first sentence is a repetition of the results, revise it. Try to build from a general theme to the literature and debates around that theme, and then how your results fit into the topic/theme. Compare and contrast your results to similar studies. Is what you find the same or different? why or why not? Try to be specific.
• Where do you emphasize what is novel about the approach? Try to emphasize novelty throughout the manuscript.
• Avoid restating the results. Is there more than one sentence in this paragraph that is restating the results? If so, try to reduce it. A good way to stop yourself from repeating the results too much is to only allow one sentence per paragraph that restates the results
• Try to avoid only citing literature on the study species.
• Avoid conjecture. If there is a sentence that does not have a citation, consider removing it.
• Is this sentence a broad, sweeping generalization? Make sure to cite large scale reviews or metaanalyses to support it. Citing a few empirical examples is also good, but make sure that the citations align with the statement.
• Do you have a section on limitations and/or future directions? If not, consider adding it. The structure can flexible, sometimes having limitations/future in each paragraph or subsection can also work.
• Do you have a section on conclusions? If not, consider adding it.
• Avoid directives. E.g. “we must do x”, “we need to”, etc.