How to Write Better Academia: Organize Your Thoughts with a Narrowing Focus

Maintaining a tight focus throughout an essay, article, thesis, or dissertation is no small feat. More often than not, our arguments or explanations are multi-faceted, and arranging them in a clear and cohesive way can be a little confusing, especially when we’re under pressure.

The trick is to deliberately organize your thoughts by moving from general to specific, or broad to narrow.

Not only does deliberate narrowing help keep the discussion focused, it also gives readers a sense of conclusion as the work moves toward its end. Kind of obvious when you think about it, but that’s the rub: keeping this concept front of mind while you both write and revise can be challenging. Like everything else, it takes practice and, often, outside help.

First, it’s useful to imagine this idea in another context, like a story. Spoiler alert, but consider All Is Lost, starring the late Robert Redford as a sailor who wakes up in the middle of an epic voyage to find he’s collided with a shipping container. His boat taking on water, he first tries to repair the breach. Then he grabs some gear and flees to a raft. After failing to signal passing ships with flares, he’s so desperate he starts burning his navigational charts, and then, well, the raft catches fire too.

At no point does he wind up back on the boat taking another shot at patching the leak. That had to happen for him to get on the raft, and once it did, there was no going back to explore some overlooked detail, not without throwing viewers for a serious loop (the boat sinks).

Coming back to non-fiction and academia, let’s imagine a thesis exploring the socio-economic impacts of AI systems in manufacturing. While it would make sense for the author to introduce and explain a few of these new systems up front, at some point readers will expect a contextualizing history of factory technology dating back to the Industrial Revolution. In a complex account like this, it would be pretty common for a deadline-driven writer to move from steam engines to mass production. From there, we might learn first about advanced robotics and then computers and factory electronics before coming back to AI. But there’s something disjointed here, and it can take a second to register.

Before we identify it, let’s imagine another example.

A dissertation candidate is studying the underrepresentation of marginalized identities in post-secondary institutions in the United States. In the introduction, the author first notes this underrepresentation, then presents statistical breakdowns of student bodies in various schools before identifying the specific schools and programs the study is going to examine and why. Concluding the introduction, the author offers a demographic breakdown of the country itself.

Both of these examples are a bit like Redford getting back on the sailboat after he’s already scrambled onto the raft.

In the first, we want to read about the role of computers and factory electronics before advanced robotics, as, chronology aside, we’ll get a better understanding of how the latter technologically emerged from the former. In the second, we want to know the demographic breakdown of America before we learn about it in the various schools, as this will help us appreciate the degree of underrepresentation. Each of these revised structures represents a steadily narrowing discussion.

This idea of going from broad to narrow, or general to specific, works on multiple levels. The whole essay, article, thesis, or dissertation should be doing this. Each chapter should be doing this. Each section and subsection should be doing it, and each paragraph should be doing it too.

Most people already understand this concept on an intuitive level, but when you’re new to writing, staring down an intense deadline, or juggling a lot of complex information, it can be hard to remember without having an editor point it out. Unfortunately, forgetting to apply it can create a lot of distraction, and the disjointment can harm your credibility.

If you can’t find someone to carefully edit your work, jot the idea down on a sticky note so you can refer to it throughout your writing and revising, especially when the structure starts to feel unwieldy. You might not be able to catch each instance, but being mindful will help you avoid the majority.