Research involves some interesting “back and forth” dynamics. Two of them are:
1. “Zoom in, zoom out” dance
2. Expand, simplify
The first one deals with how to write paragraphs. For example:
“There is little research on the effects of persona modality on users’ attention” (<= zoom out sentence = talks about the big picture). “However, of those studies that do investigate this topic, Jansen et al. (2019) find that…” (<= zoom in sentence = goes into details, logically connected with the big picture). The paragraph should start with zooming out, then zooming in, and finishing by zooming out again.
The latter one is about the research process: you find sources, you read, you get different ideas … in a word, you expand. Then, you start trimming, DROPPING most of it, eventually ending up with the *simplest solution* for the specific problem you’re tackling (but no simpler than that). This is the simplification. You need to do both well: the expansion not to miss anything important and the simplification to get the job done on a focused manner.
These are useful perspectives for PhD students.
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