Writing Up Your Findings

Researchers say: if you did not write it up, you did not do the experiment. Writing is where you discover what you actually learned — the parts that survive a second look and the parts that dissolve on contact.

A template that works every time

1. 1Title: the result in one sentence
2. 2TL;DR: the finding in 1-2 sentences
3. 3Motivation: why you ran this experiment
4. 4Method: what you did, reproducibly
5. 5Results: one figure or table plus the story it tells
6. 6Limitations: what this does not show
7. 7Takeaway: the generalizable lesson

Writing principles that travel

• State the result first, then explain how you got there (inverted pyramid)
• Every number has a confidence interval or a sample size
• One chart is worth more than paragraphs
• Never bury a negative finding
• Leave a 'things I still do not understand' section at the end

Where to publish

• Personal blog or Substack — fullest control
• LessWrong, Alignment Forum — AI-curious audience
• arXiv (if you have standing) — for citations
• Tendril's Experiment Log (planned for a future update) — for students
• A class Discord or club channel — gets fastest feedback

“If a paper is the story, the write-up is the map. Without the map, the territory was never really yours.”

The big idea: the write-up is not the part after the work. It is the part where the work becomes knowledge. Ship the post. Build the habit. The rest compounds.