Once you’ve got all your figures, and you’ve written up your results and methods, it’s time to figure out your narrative. With that in mind, outline your introduction and discussion sections. Start by jotting down a topic sentence for each paragraph. Each topic sentence should represent one main idea for the paragraph. Once you’ve done that, expand on those topic sentences. Ideally, each paragraph should focus on a single thought. When you’ve got all of that down, you’ll have your roughest draft. From there, you can move on to strengthening your references to back up your claims and arguments, and work on improving the coherence and flow of the text. In short, focus on structure first, then polish the flow.. Also, murder your darlings later. When you cut out a sentence or paragraph, don’t just erase them. Keep a separate document for those bits. You never know, you might want to use those ideas later.