By now, you’ve got the framing right (maybe with support from the Bullet Point Method).
But writing a full paper is a different beast. There’s so much rich detail and nuance throughout. And this makes it evermore important to make sure that there’s narrative and thematic coherence throughout the whole paper.
The reason it’s so important to get the outline (4-5 bullets) right is because you want the paper to follow this line of argumentation all the way through.
Moreover, the condensed bullet list (or abstract, if you’ve written it) should represent the most important terminology and keywords that must be properly introduced at the right place in the paper. These keywords tend to be good signals for what you should make sure appears throughout the paper title as well as the section, subsection, and subsubsection headings.
Said more poetically:
The abstract is a condensation of the introduction is a condensation of the fullpaper.
The point is that it eases the reading experience if the narrative structure is coherent throughout: your bullet points provide an outline that comes across at each of these three levels of the paper.
You may sometimes want to intentionally break this rule, of course, but in the general case, it is causing friction when the reader is, for instance, promised one structure of the argument in the intro, then presented with a completely different structure in the rest of the paper.
So, in summary, readers want both narrative and thematic coherence.
- Narrative coherence is that the reader can follow the same story when they read the abstract, the intro, and the whole paper. This sounds obvious – but when you are drafting your paper, you tend to lose track of this, and you don’t want to submit an incoherent paper.
- Thematic coherence is that there is a consistent theme in your paper – your terminology stays consistent, and it is clear that the terms you introduce in the beginning help you build the argument throughout, and finally conclude in the end.
Does your paper have narrative and thematic coherence?