One of my major priorities for the group this summer is increasing our paper writing abilities. Journal papers continue to be the primary communication medium of science because they convey the essential story of a research project in a form that can be shared and archived relatively uniformly across many scientific disciplines.
What is your story?
Journal papers have an underlying narrative structure built into their standard format, and the strength of the narrative can be amplified through storytelling techniques.
Setting: Describe the world of your experiment.
Drop the hammer: Your research project should be kicking off a journey. The "hammer" is some kind of event that kicks off the journey. For research, it could be as big as a major disaster or as small as a slight discrepancy in a current model.
Central Dramatic Question: What is the main issue that is being resolved by the paper. This question is usually the main hypothesis or purpose of a research paper, and all pieces of the paper should serve to build toward answering this question.
Secondary dramatic questions: these are smaller subplots or intermediate steps to answering the central dramatic question. How do we collect the data, set up the model, evaluate the question, analyze each result?