Nobody teaches the end.

There is a lot of advice about how to start a paper. There is much less about what to do with six thousand words that mostly work, a discussion section that restates the results, a limitations paragraph that apologizes, and a conclusion that says the same thing as the abstract.

Most researchers stuck at this stage assume it means the study was thin. Usually it means the only part of the process anyone explained to them was the beginning.

Wrap It Up! is a self-paced workshop.

It comprises nine recorded sessions and a workbook, covering the last stretch of a journal paper, from the discussion section to the day you submit.

I supervised 33 graduate students at the National University of Singapore and co-authored 14 papers with them, which means I have read dozens of versions of the almost-finished paper. They get stalled in about four places. This is those four places.

There's no session where I read your manuscript and tell you what's wrong with it. This one is self-paced.

What's here instead is a full session on feedback — how to ask peers and mentors for the kind that's useful, and what to do with the kind that isn't. The researchers I've worked with longest don't need me anymore. They carry a question they ask themselves, and one of them put it better than I could:

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Even today, writing a dry policy review or a methodology section, I catch myself asking: what would Jessica ask here to make this easier to understand?

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Harpreet Kaur, Independent Researcher, Delhi

One round of my feedback fixes one paper. Knowing how to go get feedback fixes the next four.

You'll also find me in The Watering Hole. It's free and open to anyone — you don't need this workshop to join. But this is usually when people finally do, because I answer questions there.

Two weeks.

That's how I design it. Not two weeks of working constantly — the sessions and the workbook break the last stretch into pieces small enough that you can finish one and stop, which is the only way momentum survives contact with a real week. The first session is where you decide what those two weeks look like on your own calendar.

Then it goes out for feedback, and that takes up to two weeks more. That part isn't up to you, so plan for it. It's also the step most people skip, usually because asking feels like an imposition.

Four weeks, then, from where you are now to a paper you can send. You've probably spent longer than that this year rereading it.

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No doubt they saved myself and the publisher from the mild embarrassment of poor grammar, style, and communication.

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Cynthia Wee, Graduate Student, National University of Singapore

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Her most distinctive strength was her ability to see the skeleton of an argument even in a messy, unresolved draft. And my drafts were messy!

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Harpreet Kaur, Independent Researcher, India

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I just received the acceptance notification and am absolutely thrilled to see our paper officially published.

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Jing Chen, Independent Researcher, China

Is this for you?

Yes, if:

• You have a full or nearly full draft and the end is just out of reach
• A reviewer said your discussion doesn't add anything, and you're not sure what they wanted instead
• You've read your own paper so many times you can't see it anymore
• You've been sitting on this one for months, or years, and would like to get it off your desk

Not yet, if:

• You don't have a draft. Start with Kick-Start Your Paper, or take the full ten weeks with Draft It!
• You want me to edit the manuscript for you. That's the 1:1 work, and it's a different thing.