ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on conventional wisdom about structuring a thesis to illustrate the problem of premature use of templates or formulae to make sense of our research. The traditional format is described as IMRAD-Introduction, Methods, Report and Discuss. IMRAD encourages the writer to present pieces of argument in isolated pieces rather than develop an extended and overarching argument to follow. Richardson and St Pierre are standing against a view of research which is about collecting data as if it's just out there ready to be picked up, like a bunch of wildflowers, against a view of analysis as simply a process of picking things out and coding them through predetermined programmes or statistical procedures that seem straightforward. The weakness of IMRAD and other templates is that they encourage you to think of chapters as a set of content holders, methods, literature, findings for containing stuff.
