Message Box Introduction

The message box: a tool for science writing

Coherent organization of ideas is key for their effective communication to others. It is a critical skill to develop for any profession. For communicating science, the "message box" is a great tool for clarifying our own thought process as we develop a paper or proposal or informal communications, and can help us work towards the goal of effectively and clearly conveying our ideas to someone else.

Here is how the message box works. We start by defining four key questions that have to be addressed, and the most logical order for them to be answered in. (One way to think about how we order information in an introduction is to keep in mind that the goal is to “funnel” our readers from a very broad, wide view of the research problem down to the specific questions that we will address in our study).

1. The "So What?": Start with explaining why this topic/area of research matters (why should/would your reader, or anyone else, care?) We think about this at a very broad level, meaning why would people who are not necessarily specialized experts in the issue you are writing about still want to know something about this topic or benefit from new scientific information?

1. What do we already know?: We need to summarize what is already understood about the problem or topic identified as important in part 1. You will use more technical terminology here.

1. What do we not know (and need more information about)?: In this section, we need to explain what the gap(s) in our understanding might be. Of course, there are a number of things we could write down in a section like this, but our goal is to pick some specific points that are related to what we did in our own research.

1. What research question did we pose/data collect to address this gap?: Finally, we finish off (at the narrow end of the "funnel") by stating our specific research question and hypothesis and briefly summarize how answering this question will address the gaps in our knowledge identified in #3 above.

If you can do these four things, then voila, you effectively have the “bones” (structure) of an effective introduction in a piece of science writing. This can be applied to writing letters to other scientists or non-scientists, writing a short commentary in a newspaper, writing an introduction section to a scientific manuscript for publication, or the introduction to a proposal for grant money.

ASSIGNMENT

Write a draft of a Message Box for your experiment.

In a separate document number each question above (1-4) and provide an answer of one to three sentences for each. Typed, please.