Structuring the Discussion 115
candidates who are alert to shortcomings and limitations in their own work; indeed,
why respect someone who shows no critical insight and seems to think that their
accomplishments are without flaw? Step back, ask the questions of your work that
you would ask of the work of other people, and use the answers to make your dis-
cussion penetrating and insightful.
Structuring the Discussion
How can you design a structure for the discussion that will enable you to get logi-
cally to your conclusions when you don’t know what they are? Indeed, if you had
no idea what the conclusions were, it would not be possible.
The resolution of the paradox is simple—we are asking the wrong question.
When we assume that we don’t know what the conclusions are, we are only partly
right. The rational part of our brain is telling us that we don’t know what the con-
clusions are because it knows that it is the function of the discussion to find out
what they are. But the creative part of our brain has been working on this problem
ever since the research project began. It has been trying out ideas and associations,
sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting, sometimes getting it right, sometimes
wrong, but seldom informing the rational part of our brain what it has been doing,
or where it has got to. Without this, research would not be possible. We have been
doing research in our unconscious, creative minds all the time, and we have reached
unconscious, creative conclusions.
The key to writing the discussion is for you to bring these unconscious conclu-
sions to the conscious realm, and commit them to screen or paper. Your rational
brain can then sort them out and do its best to make sense of them. You can then
use them to design the structure of the chapter on the assumption that they are the
conclusions. This is how to do it:
- Begin by brainstorming. Write down all the things that you know now that you
didn’t know when you started the research; a single sentence for each item.
These can be big ideas, little ideas, snippets of knowledge, insights, answers to
questions, whatever. Don’t worry about whether you are responding to the aim
you set yourself in your introductory chapter. That would be a rational approach,
whereas you are engaged in a process of dredging up unconscious conclusions.
Consider asking your supervisor or a colleague who is familiar with your work
to sit down with you while you are listing these conclusions. The presence of
another person, chipping in and asking questions, may help you to uncover your
hidden thoughts. You should end up with a totally undifferentiated list of maybe
20 or 30 ‘conclusions’. - Sort these into groups of associated ideas (now using your rational brain). You
will probably end up with three or four groups. If you have more than four
groups, you may have included conclusions that emerged earlier as conclusions
to your background chapters, but which have not interacted with your own work.