Okay now that you have hopefully thought about the content of your discussion section it's time to turn
it into writing
starting with the first paragraphs. And before you get started I encourage you to think a little bit
about the structure of your discussion section.
So there are generally two options: (1) you can write everything as one text or (2)you can write it with subsections
and very common here is that papers have an implication section and a limitation section. And you need
to have a look
what makes the most sense in your case. And most likely this will be determined by how much you have
to say about each aspect that we discussed before.
Okay now let's start with the first paragraph of your discussion section and as I already said the goal
here is to summarize your article up to this point. And common expressions you see here are: "In the present
article, we investigated wether..." and then the research question. Or "Our study addressed the question whether..."
and so on.
"Our goal was to...". "The results showed that...". So this part is actually quite straightforward. It's just a summary
of what you did.
Then in the next paragraphs you go into the interpretation of your results and make sure that there
is a switch in paragraph or section from the summary to the interpretation so that they are clearly
separated and what you want to do is interpret your results
and most of the time you will also immediately compare them to existing research. And when you do that, the
most important point that you want to make clear is: what did you add to that research?
So common expressions you'll find here are: "There are three possible explanations for these results"
"One possible explanation is that...". "Another possible explanation is that...". "Our findings are in conflict with
the long-held belief that...". So here we are comparing with previous research. "Contrary to the findings by
Devin at all.
our findings indicate that..." and so on.
Or "Our findings converge with previous findings.
In addition they show for the first time that...". So this is important: if your findings converge with what
has been shown before,
you want to make clear what you ADDED to those findings. So that is how you write the beginning of your
discussion section and you can find more expressions for this part in the "discussion outline and writing
template" that I showed you earlier.
All right let's move to the next lecture.