When it comes to doing something serious, I believe in systems. Like the author Scott Adams says in his book How to fail at almost everything and still win big

A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

So I’d like to have a good systems for writing a manuscript. But what is a good order to start writing? Luckily, I found some great resources out there.

From Book Writing your journal article in 12 weeks

Outline your article

Abstract your article

Writing a three-to five-page draft: Here a recommended order quoted in the book from scholar Kevin Corley

The easiest part of the paper to start writing is the methods, right? Because as you’re collecting data, you write what you’re doing. Then I’ll write an intro that basically frames what it is I think I’m going to be writing about. Then I typically work on the findings section and discussion section. Once I have a good draft of that discussion section, I’ll go back and write the literature review around what it now needs to be, based on the discussion. Because again, doing inductive research, you can’t write your literature review beforehand. (quoted in Cloutier 2015, 77)

From Coursera course Writing in the Sciences course

Recommended order for writing:

  1. Tables and Figures
  1. Results
  1. Methods
  1. Introduction
  1. Discussion
  1. Abstract

From Professor Jeff Leek’s guide to first paper

  1. Once you have a set of results and are ready to start writing up the paper the first thing is not to write. The first thing you should do is create a set of 1-4 publication-quality plots (see Chapter 10 here). Show these to Jeff to get confirmation on them before proceeding.
  1. Start a project on Overleaf and invite Jeff to join.
  1. Write up a story around the four plots in the simplest language you feel you can get away with, while still reporting all of the technical details that you can.
  1. Go back and add references in only after you have finished the whole first draft.
  1. Add in additional technical detail in the supplementary material if you need it.
  1. Write up a reproducible version of your code that returns exactly the same numbers/figures in your paper with no input parameters needed.

You can see the recommended order from “Writing in the Sciences” and from Prof Leek are relatively similar, while the order from the book differs a bit. I think that’s actually a good thing. For example, the book says writing the abstract first is to help you develop your ideas, that draft of abstract is unlikely to be in the final print. This way, you can play with the macrostructure of your arguments. I find this idea valuable. Similar goes for outline, the book recommend outline anytime you feel the structure is unclear.

Taking these into account, my current practice of writing is: start with figures/tables, then write an outline of the paper, then write the results, methods and introduction. At this point, I often get stuck on what to write in Discussion. So I read. Usually reading helps me to come up with something to put my research into the prospective of a bigger picture, so I can write how’s this article is relevant to the field. Then I work on the abstract.

I am still a beginner in writing manuscript. So I’ll keep practicing and modifying my system. I found it helpful to see a few examples to develop my own writing system. Hope you can find something helpful too!