When you are writing a short class paper, there is seldom enough time to get heavily invested in the details. It usually seems that by the time you have figured out exactly what you’re doing, the deadline is already looming ahead of you. It’s a different situation with a dissertation or a journal article, however, because these are the products of long periods of research and reflection. During those stretches of time, the topic takes on more than merely academic importance and becomes a constant companion: it is there when you start your workday and when you end it. The research begins to take on a sort of life and personality of its own, and you may even begin to feel as if you’re merely acting as the conduit for this information to reach the reader.
The trouble with this is that once you have amassed large quantities of research, the tide of information can threaten to overwhelm the structure of the writing. My own historical research in archives turned up some fascinating records of the opinions, deeds, and struggles of past people, and in more than one chapter draft I found myself focused on relating these stories, to the detriment of the argument. This is sometimes disparagingly called “info-dumping”: the practice of throwing all the information that your research has uncovered into your paragraphs. The result is that your readers find themselves faced with a torrent of factual or anecdotal material with no bridge over it. However compelling the information may be, busy academic readers will lose interest in it if you don’t help them make sense of it throughout the piece of writing.
There are several strategies you can follow to manage the flood of information. The first is to determine the most salient points in each segment of research, leaving the remainder in your research file, to be called on if needed. If you’ve already written part of the piece, sometimes simply introducing ordering devices like new topic sentences can help to draw a section back to the main thesis. However, if you are trying to deal with a draft chapter or article that has already been totally deluged by data and you cannot see a clear path through it, you may find yourself taking a more drastic approach, as I did: rewriting the whole thing in a new document that prioritizes the argument structure, choosing which pieces of your previous version can work effectively within the new framework. Finally, you can try creating a skeleton document that only has the argument framework, with blank spaces where the informational content will go. You can either use this structure as a foundation for a new piece or import it into an existing draft. Whichever strategy you decide to try, it’s worth remembering that you can never entirely do away with the tension between the desire to share the content of your research and the need for structure and order. Like so much in academic writing, it’s a matter of finding a balance that works for you and your readers.
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