If you are planning to produce a paper that develops ideas and theories, you may find it helpful to review the chapters on Creating a message and Organising your ideas in Effective Writing: core skills. The structure of such papers is largely determined by the content of the arguments presented. You will find all the help you need in writing such papers in that section.

Papers that report on empirical data arising from primary research or experiments tend to have a standardised structure: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion. You must therefore organise your ideas around that structure. We will explain how you do that later in this manual.