Case Study 1 — Lena Foss's Results Section: Editorializing Removed

A composite, fictional-but-realistic scenario. Dr. Lena Foss and her specific numbers are invented; the experiment (an alumina cathode coating tested for high-voltage stability) is illustrative. But the draft she hands back to her student, and the way it gets fixed, are exactly what happens in real labs every week. The science is a vehicle for the structure — no real journal, dataset, or DOI is implied.

The situation

A new graduate student in Dr. Lena Foss's materials lab has run a careful experiment: a thin alumina coating on an NMC cathode, cycled at 4.5 V against an uncoated control, to test whether the coating survives the high-voltage regime where most coatings fail. The data are good. The coated cells held up; the controls degraded. It is a real, publishable result.

Then the student writes the Results section, and Lena's red pen comes out. Not because the science is wrong — because the writing has tangled what happened together with what it means, and a reviewer can no longer tell the observation from the spin. Here is what the student wrote.

❌ Before (Results contaminated with interpretation): "The coated cells performed excellently, retaining an impressive 92% of their capacity after 200 cycles — clear evidence that the alumina coating effectively protects the cathode from electrolyte attack. As expected, the uncoated control cells performed poorly (74% retention), confirming that surface degradation is the dominant failure mode and proving that coating is essential for any high-voltage cathode. Encouragingly, the coated cells also showed much lower impedance growth, which demonstrates the coating's superior stability and suggests these cells are ready for commercial deployment."

Reading it the way a reviewer does

Lena doesn't rewrite it yet. She reads it aloud the way a skeptical reviewer would — pausing at each word that judges or explains rather than observes. The margin notes are what's running through the reviewer's head.

"The coated cells performed excellently,             ← "Excellently" is a judgment, not an
 retaining an impressive 92% ..."                       observation. So is "impressive." What
                                                        happened is a number: 92%. The verdict
                                                        is the reader's to reach, not yours to
                                                        announce.

"... clear evidence that the alumina coating          ← Interpretation. "Clear evidence that
 effectively protects the cathode from                  ... protects ... from electrolyte attack"
 electrolyte attack."                                   is a causal mechanism — a Discussion
                                                        claim the raw numbers don't establish.

"As expected, the uncoated control cells              ← "As expected" smuggles in the hypothesis.
 performed poorly (74%), confirming that                "Poorly" is a judgment. "Confirming ...
 surface degradation is the dominant failure            dominant failure mode" and "proving ...
 mode and proving that coating is essential."           essential" are causal + general claims
                                                        the data can't carry. Three violations
                                                        in one sentence.

"Encouragingly, the coated cells also showed          ← "Encouragingly" (judgment), "much lower"
 much lower impedance growth, which                     (vague + evaluative), "demonstrates ...
 demonstrates the coating's superior                    superior stability" (causal claim),
 stability and suggests these cells are                 "ready for commercial deployment"
 ready for commercial deployment."                      (an overclaim from nine coin cells).

The verdict Lena reaches: the student has reported almost no observations and a great many conclusions. Strip out everything that judges or explains, and what actually happened — the part a reader needs to evaluate the work — is two retention numbers and an impedance trend. Everything else is the student telling the reader what to think before showing them the evidence to think with. A reviewer reading this can't separate the finding from the interpretation, so they can't independently judge whether the interpretation is earned. And the moment they hit "ready for commercial deployment" on nine coin cells, they stop trusting the rest.

The rebuild

Lena doesn't hand back a rewrite. She gives the student one instruction: "Write the Results so that a rival who thinks your coating is useless would still have to agree with every sentence. Move every judgment and every 'because' to the Discussion, where it belongs." Here is what comes back.

✅ After (Results: observation only): "After 200 cycles at 4.5 V, the alumina-coated cells retained 92% ± 2% of their initial capacity (n = 9). The uncoated control cells retained 74% ± 4% (n = 9). The difference in capacity retention between coated and uncoated cells was statistically significant (p < 0.01, two-sample t-test). Coated cells also showed lower impedance growth over cycling, with cell impedance rising 18% versus 47% for controls over the 200 cycles (Figure 2)."

Why the rebuilt version works

Set the two side by side and the change is mechanical — you can point at exactly what moved.

Notice what did not happen: the interpretation didn't vanish. The idea that the coating protects the cathode is a perfectly good Discussion claim — Lena's student will make it, carefully, two paragraphs later, tied to the impedance evidence and to prior work, and bounded ("most plausibly," not "proves"). It just no longer lives in the Results, pre-coloring the data before the reader can see it clean. Same finding; the observation and the interpretation are now in separate rooms.

The "after" version is also, paradoxically, more convincing — not less. By refusing to tell the reader the result is "excellent," it lets the numbers do the persuading, and a reviewer trusts numbers far more than adjectives. The 18-percentage-point gap, stated flatly, lands harder than "performed excellently" ever could.

The takeaways

1. Results report what happened; the meaning waits for the Discussion. This is the discipline of the genre and the threshold concept of the chapter (§13.5). A Results section that judges and explains has done the Discussion's job in the wrong place.
2. Hunt three tells. Judgment words (excellent, impressive, poorly, encouragingly), causal verbs (demonstrates, confirms, proves, protects from), and the hypothesis-importing phrase as expected. Each hit in a Results draft is a candidate to cut or relocate (§13.5).
3. Numbers persuade better than adjectives. "Retained 92% ± 2%" is stronger evidence than "performed excellently" — and a skeptic can't argue with it. Let the data carry the weight.
4. The acid test: could a rival who disagrees with your interpretation still accept every sentence of your Results? If yes, the boundary is clean. If they'd object to a word, that word is interpretation hiding in the observation.

One sentence to remember: If a sentence in your Results tells the reader whether the result is good or why it happened, it isn't a result — it's a Discussion claim that wandered into the wrong section.