Research Before Writing: Gathering Your Material and Verifying It
Research Before Writing: Gathering Your Material and Verifying It
Good research precedes the script rather than accompanying it. Gather material first from varied sources, distinguish what you saw yourself from what others reported, and verify every figure or claim before it enters the script. The practical rule: any fact whose source and date you can't state confidently should be cut, or rewritten as an open question rather than presented as established.
Why researching while writing fails
Researching as you write leads you to select the facts that support what you just wrote, rather than the ones that describe reality. The result is a script that looks coherent and falls apart under review, because the order of work itself pushed you toward what was comfortable.
Separate the two stages: gather first without writing, then write from what you gathered.
Four layers of sources
Rank your sources by their proximity to the event:
- Direct testimony. What you saw yourself, or what someone who lived it told you. The strongest source and the hardest to obtain.
- Primary documents. Official statements, figures issued by the body concerned, records and archives. Strong when read in full rather than excerpted.
- Specialist coverage. Journalists or researchers reporting from the two layers above. Useful for context, and worth tracing back to the original.
- Recycled content. Articles and clips reporting from a reporter. The weakest, useful for establishing that a subject exists rather than for citation.
The rule: whenever you build an important claim, climb a layer or two before fixing it in place.
Verifying a figure in practice
Before putting any number in your script, answer three questions:
- Who issued it? A named body, not "studies suggest."
- When? A figure without a date is meaningless, because conditions change.
- What exactly does it measure? Many numbers get lifted out of context and end up saying something other than what they measured.
If you can't reach a clear answer, you have two options: cut the figure, or state it with explicit attribution to its source and date and let the viewer judge. Presenting it as bare fact is a risk published under your name.
Signals that warrant doubt
- A figure circulating everywhere with no original source named.
- A claim that fits your narrative rather too neatly — the most dangerous case, because wanting it to be true disables scrutiny.
- A translation from a foreign source without returning to the original text.
- Information several years old in a fast-moving subject.
Organise research so it serves the writing
Keep research notes inside the video's own project rather than a separate file, so the material sits beside the script that will be built from it. Record each fact's source and date at the moment you find it; going back two weeks later to recall who said what costs more time than noting it immediately. The project structure is covered in Managing Content Production Projects: Organise Ideas and Scripts in One Place with Bardiyah.
When to stop researching
Research can continue indefinitely and become a disguised way of postponing the writing. The right moment to stop is when you can state the core idea in one sentence and defend it with three independent sources. Beyond that, more research improves the margins without changing the substance.
AI at this stage
An assistant is useful for summarising material you gathered, suggesting angles you hadn't considered, and surfacing contradictions between two sources. Generating the facts themselves is not a safe use: any figure emerging from a generative model needs verification against a named source exactly like any other, as covered in AI Tools Inside TikTok: What to Delegate and What to Keep.