Keep yourself on track through headings and key terms - Drafting your paper - Research and writing

A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, Ninth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2018

Keep yourself on track through headings and key terms
Drafting your paper
Research and writing

Here are two techniques you can use to keep yourself on track as you draft.

Use headings—ideally full sentences—to break your draft into manageable chunks and to show how your sections are related to one another. Even if papers in your field don’t ordinarily use headings and subheadings, you can still use them as you draft and delete them later.

You can also use lists of key terms to keep yourself on track. As you draft, keep in front of you both the terms that should run through your whole paper and those specific to individual sections (see 6.2.3 and 6.2.4). From time to time, check how often you’ve used those words, both those that run through the whole paper and those that distinguish one section from another. If you find yourself writing something that lacks those terms, pause and reflect: are you just off track, or are you discovering something new? You need not stay yoked to your original plan: you are free to follow a new path to see where it leads, but do that as a choice—not just because you got lost along the way.