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Chekhov’s gun in academic writing

The principle of Chekhov’s gun suggests any element introduced into a story needs to serve a purpose. If you introduce a gun then someone should eventually use it. I increasingly feel the same point can be made about academic writing. In some fields there is a tendency to confuse the context of discovery with context of justification, including the process through which you developed the ideas into what is ultimately a justification of those ideas. This inevitably leads to elements which don’t serve a purpose in the argument as opposed to being mementos of the journey the author went on to develop that argument.

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