Academic writing tips for Introduction and conclusion: when less is more

Here are some of the tips I have learnt in academic writing during my PhD. Here I will talk about the way I try to tailor my abstract, introduction and conclusion.

The most important factor: Readers

Even though the readers for each journal will differ slightly, we will not be wrong to assume that many of the readers will not be expert in the exact field we are writing about. So as a general rule of thumb, if possible, every technical jargon or niche specialized topics should be written in a slightly layman language to guide the non-expert readers. Results and Discussion should be the section with all the minute details of our research. However, other sections such as introduction, abstract and conclusion should be written in a way to make the understanding easier for non-experts.

Introduction

Most papers are written to identify a research gap in the literature. As authors we try to argue that our work tries to fill the research gap. However, we can add value to the research gap by providing more evidence related to the research gap. In particular answering these two questions will help making the introduction of the work much stronger. 1) What is the cost associated with not filling the research gap ? and 2) How will the readers of this work benefit from filling this research gap? Answers to these questions can convince readers to reader the rest of your paper.

Conclusion

Before we talk about writing the conclusion section, its worth highlighting that many readers will not read a journal article from top to bottom. Most readers will skim the article abstract, introduction and conclusion before diving deep in the results and discussion section if they are still interested. Because the reading style is not that linear, writing the conclusion section should also cater to this non-linearity.

Firstly, the conclusion must also be less technical to make the readers life easy in digesting the information presented, especially when they are reading the conclusions without reading the results and discussion section. Hence, the labels, jargon and terminology introduced in the results and discussion section must be avoided in the conclusion section. Secondly, the conclusion section must not repeat the recipe of the whole manuscript again. Instead, the conclusion should summarize the results in a much broader context. The conclusion should inform readers the other possible areas where the results are relevant or applicable. Finally, we must always take note that our research is a small subset of a much broader field. The results we obtain from our work should add some value to the big picture. Therefore, if the conclusion is applicable to a much broader research problem, the value added by our work will also be higher and it will automatically appeal a much broader audience.

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These are not hard and fast rules I follow to write the introduction and the conclusion section. These are the ideas I have gained from my own journey. Thank you for reading through.