One trick to use to help write your discussion is to mirror (like a reflection) most of the structure you use in the introduction.
This was the topic of our lab discussion today. Here’s one example, given as a re-write in blog format of lab member Richard Takyi’s recent paper on climate change and its impact on fisheries
Introduction - common structure
Context for the study - Fisheries are impacted by climate change
Problem that you will address on the study - If its not accounted for climate change can bias the assessments we use to inform management decisions, misleading management and contributing to unsustainable decisions.
What has been said about this problem before (1-2 paragraphs) - Data intensive assessments can be biased in counter-intuitive ways - Assessment methods that use fish length are popular for small scale and data poor fisheries, but we don’t know how climate change will impact their reliability.
What you will do and aims - Study how climate warming impacts on fish growth could bias length based assessments of fish stocks.
Discussion - as a mirror of the introduction
What we found for the aims - Warming tended to make assessments less conservative (the assessment said there was more bigger fish than there was) - Accounting for the effects of warming on growth is neccessary to prevent assessments from making biased findings about the health of fish stocks
How our findings advance earlier studies on this problem - Show how models of fish growth under temperature can be used in data poor assessments - Show that data poor assessment methods can be biased by climate warming
How our findings advance the problem - We show how warming can be accounted for in data poor assessments
Caveats/future research needs - Future research could consider other types of climate impacts, like changes in population recruitment or foodwebs
Link back to broad context of the study - Management needs assessment methods that are robust to climate change - We show how to account for warming in a data poor assessment method - The method could be used to improve the management of fish stocks in climate hotspots