: Re: What methods can I use to revise my writing? Background I am finding it challenging to transform an early draft into a finished product. My biggest challenges are putting the prose in the

@Pope4766717

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Getting journal/conference articles ready for submission is a little different than for research proposals, but it is easier to talk just about articles because of their standard format.

A journal article will typically exist in four states of compression: the introduction will be a precis of the whole article, and the abstract will distill the original contribution laid out in the introduction. The title should at least be suggestive the contribution described in the abstract. The shortness of the these stages of compression is inversely proportional to how often they will be read: titles and abstracts are very widely read; introductions are read by those interested enough in the abstract to want to read more, but most people who read the introduction through will not care to get to grips with the body of the work. Each of these more compressed stages can be seen as an invitation to progress to the next stage.

Your problem sounds like you do not see how the content at the last stage relates to one of the earlier stages. There are several ways I can think of that may cause this:

You have certain things you want to say in the body of your article that don't relate particularly well to your abstract. For instance, suppose you are writing about a drug trial of a therapy for some disorder and you happen to know a lot of interesting history of the treatment of that disorder. Your text might be full of discussion of changes in best practice that aren't obviously related to the drug trial that you set out to write up.
You might set out to write up your demonstration establishing some fact, and then discover that your demonstration was not as watertight as you thought, or that the argument is immensely tricky, hard to follow, or tedious when written up in full. Then writing up starts to involve new research, and the text evolves in an unexpected way as part of a process that does not seem to end.

In each case, you can impose sanity by turning to the abstract. In the first example, you need to decide if your historical part is going to be part of the article at all: try writing two alternative abstracts, one including it and one that doesn't, and decide which will make for a better article; perhaps you will end up with abstracts for two articles. In the second case, you should be asking whether you can find an abstract that will give a worthwhile article without need for further research, and if not, it is time to stop writing up and start deciding what the research problem is that should be working on.

A couple of asides: If you are going to be breaking up text and putting sections of text on ice, distributed version control software, such as git can be useful, although the learning curve for this software is (still) steep. Then, while many guidelines to writing research papers suggest up to 300 words (more words than are normally found on an undecorated page) for an abstract, abstracts should very rarely be more than 150 words. The shorter the better, provided the constraint about all significant contributions being recorded is respected.

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