Saving the confused paper

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

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…