116 9 The Discussion or Interpretation
Perhaps these were important at the time, but they are not conclusions from your
whole research. You may test this by asking, ‘Does this conclusion respond to the
aim I stated in my introductory chapter?’ Reject those that don’t, but first check
that you did give them clearly as conclusions in the earlier chapters where they
belonged. If you still have more than four groups of conclusions, try coalescing
them.- Give a heading to each group. These headings will form the section headings in
your discussion chapter. The function of each section is to argue for the conclu-
sions that you will be drawing later. Examine these headings to see which order
they should go in. (You will find that some of the groups of conclusions don’t
make too much sense unless you have already dealt with others.) - Each section will contain several points, as identified by the separate conclu-
sions that you have already listed for that section. These could form sub-headings
within the section. Sort these sub-headings into a logical order, reject ones that
are obviously irrelevant, add others that you now see you missed by your earlier
haphazard identification process, and coalesce points under one heading if this
makes sense (you should not have more than three sub-headings within a section).
You will now have a tentative structure for the discussion chapter and may give
your creative brain permission to write the text, using this structure as a framework.
When you start to write, you will not be stepping out into the void.
This balancing of the rational and creative parts of our brains by writing creative-
ly to a rational structure will work only if you treat it in this way. There will be an
ongoing tug-of-war. Often your creative mind will take you away from the rational
structure. When this happens, don’t assume that the creative mind is always right.
Similarly, don’t assume that the rational mind is always right. But you cannot leave
it unresolved: you must bring either the structure or the wayward text into line. This
problem will be particularly acute in this chapter, because the rational structure you
are using is tentative, being itself based on conclusions garnered from the creative
mind. However, our experience is that at this stage of the research the creative
mind has already done marvellous things, and usually you won’t have to change the
structure much, even though you may modify some of the individual conclusions.
The process I have described probably seems messy, with much experimentation
and correction to do. Messy it is, but this is the chapter where research is still going on;
it is the main one in which the act of writing might cause you to find out more, where
knowledge might become wisdom. Nevertheless, you may find it relatively easy to
write the chapter because this chapter is the one that all the others were leading to.
Remembering Your Aim and Scope
A function of the discussion section is to respond to the aim you set in the introduc-
tory chapter. Before they start a detailed reading of your thesis, most examiners will
flip from your introduction to your conclusions to see how your concluding ideas
line up with your original ones. They have been asked to do this in the suggested