Sharique Hasan

Making points

An academic article is a persuasive text, with the purpose of convincing readers of a series of points that they may or may not have believed before reading your article. To achieve this, it is crucial to save their time on extraneous information and make it easy for them to understand your main message. In other words, what is your point?

I took a fantastic online class from a Wall Street Journal journalist. Even though I had been writing academic articles for over a decade before watching this course, it made me think more clearly about my points. In some academic circles, there is a tendency to need clarification about the point being made. Let me be clear: the main task in an academic article is to sequence a series of points that lead to a larger point. This approach leads to sharp writing.

Each paragraph should have a clear point to make. For example, in the introduction, which typically consists of five paragraphs, the paragraphs are structured in an hourglass fashion. The first paragraph should convey the importance of the topic and the research question. The second paragraph should present an alternative view to the one that is commonly accepted. The third paragraph should provide evidence to support the author’s argument. The fourth paragraph should present the findings, and the fifth paragraph should explain why the findings matter.

For instance, in one of my papers, the main points of each paragraph are like topic sentences:

• Understanding the process by which fundamental scientific discoveries are commercialized is vital to researchers and policymakers.
• Most research has not considered the commercial potential of scientific discoveries.
• We propose a method for extracting the latent commercial potential of scientific discoveries using machine learning and crowdsourcing.
• Our measures significantly predict eventual commercialization.
• Our approach can help researchers better understand where commercial potential lies and how to overcome friction.

Once the main points are established, it is time to expand on them by including subpoints. The next step is to organize the relevant points to make the main point as strong as possible. The order of the points is critical, and the goal is for readers to understand the paragraph’s content without having to reread it.

In summary, the metric you want to use is: can people read the paragraph and know exactly what is going on without rereading it. That is when you know that you have written a strong paragraph that gets your point across.