Studio 3: Ground it in verified evidence
This studio is part of a book in active development and has not yet been through the author’s review. Content may change as the review advances.
What you can defend when you leave. Find out what is already known, verify that it is actually known, and let it change your question.
The milestone ahead
No question is asked in an empty room. Before you spend months answering yours, this milestone makes you find out what is already known, verify that it is actually known rather than merely repeated, and let the verified record change your question. It is also where the book’s evidence rail becomes physical: the registry you assemble here is what every later citation traces back to, all the way to the release audit in Studio 12.
This studio closes with Milestone 3: Your evidence base, a short chapter of its own after the lessons. What it asks you to produce. An evidence registry of verified sources, your search log, an evidence map, and an explicit revision of your Studio 2 declaration.
Milestone 4 takes your revised question and the gap your evidence map exposed, and writes them into a research contract that can be diagnosed. The milestone chapter keeps the working details: the practice steps, the versioned record, and how the artifact is assessed.
The lessons in this studio
Read them in order, working each lesson’s It is your turn as you go. Each one builds a piece of Milestone 3; beside each lesson is the piece it hands you.
- Lesson 8 — Research Builds on Research: your candidate source list with a status column, seeded by your own search, an AI sweep, and hand snowballing, with a lead source marked.
- Lesson 9 — Finding and Verifying Prior Evidence: your verified sources, your evidence map with its quiet spot, your gap written as one bounded sentence, and your revised declaration — or the defended reason it holds.
When the last lesson closes, the milestone chapter is next. Nothing you write in a lesson is busywork: every piece above is on the milestone’s checklist.