I came across a blog that can be a model of what I am envisioning for my small blog. It’s called BPS Research Digest. Although it is a authoritative blog published by the British Psychological Society and my blog is just by me, I would like to use this space to review the paper I found interesting in the manner that BPS presents.
The post that led me into the blog is this. I quickly analyzed the structure of the writing to have a guideline for myself. http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-self-fulfilling-fallacy.html
From reading this post, a general structure I could write is as follows.
- Introduce with a commonly known story that could be potentially the motivation of the research. In this case, the author mentions a common human error in judgment called the Gambler’s Fallacy. (about 150 words)
- Explain what the authors actually did in the paper. Experiment? Modeling? Secondary data analysis? Highlight the main contribution only even if the authors have done many things for the whole paper. (about 100 words)
- Insert a picture in the middle if it can be helpful. (optional; Search Creative Commons images from flickr here)
- Summarize the results. (about 200 words)
- Summarize the authors’ interpretation on the results. (about 150 words)
- Conclude by going back to the introductory theme used in the introduction—the gambler’s fallacy in this case. (about 100 words)
If I can write this way, this alone will amount to 600-700 words. I hope it will be a good exercise for me to learn how to shape a good research question.