Writing

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have a nice list of the Ten Most Important Rules of Writing Your Job Market Paper.  However, these tips can be used for almost any type of non-fiction writing.  Some of my favorites include:

Rule #1: You will probably not have a Nobel Prize winning idea.

• Theorem #1: It is always possible to transform a good idea into a great paper and a superb presentation.
• Theorem #2: Even if your idea is Nobel-worthy, you can always make it into a poorly written paper and a lousy presentation. This theorem will probably never be needed; see Rule #1.

Rule #3: Your paper is an exercise in persuasion (we mean in positive not normative economics). Your readers are your audience. They have better things to do than read your paper. Make them interested in your thesis and convinced of your argument.

Rule #4: No great paper—no matter how well constructed, brilliant, and well written—first emerged from the author’s printer in that form. It was rewritten at least 10 times. Rewriting is the true art of writing.

Rule #5: No author—no matter how careful and humble—can see all (or even most) of his or her writing errors. Trade papers with another student. Be tough; there will be some initial pain, but gratitude will follow.

Rule #6: Most paragraphs have too many sentences and most sentences have too many words. Repetition is boring. We repeat: repetition is boring. Cut, cut, and then cut again.

Rule #8: Verbalizing your argument is more difficult than writing it. Giving a presentation will reveal where your argument falls flat and will show you how to redraft the paper. Give many presentations before sending out your paper. Give them to a workshop, friends, a dog or cat, even the wall. The presentation will force you to confront inconsistencies in your argument.

John Cochrane gives writing tips for Ph.D. students.  One of the key insights it the following:

“Many economists falsely think of themselves as scientists who just “write up” research. We are not; we are primarily writers. Economics and finance papers are essays. Most good economists spend at least 50% of the time they put into any project on writing. For me, it’s more like 80%.”

Below are some other highlights from this paper.

• “Figure out the one central and novel contribution of your paper.  Write this down in one paragraph.”
• “A good paper is not a travelogue of your search process.”
• “The main point of the literature review should be to set your paper off against the 2 or 3 closest current papers, and to give proper credit to people who deserve priority for things that might otherwise seem new in your paper.”
• In the body of the paper, your task is to get to the central result as fast as possible.
• “There should be nothing before the main result that a reader does not need to know in order to understand the main result.”
• “…the theory must be the minimum required for the reader to understand the empirical results.”
• “As you edit the paper ask yourself constantly, ‘can I make the same point in less space?’ and ‘Do I really have to say this?’”
• “Follow the rule ‘first describe what you do, then explain it, compare it to alternatives, and compare it to others’ procedures’ at the micro level as well as the macro level. For example, in describing a data transformation, just start with, say, ‘I adjust income by the square root of household size’. Then tell us why adjusting is important, and then talk about different adjustment functions. Most writers do all this in the reverse order.”
• “Simple is better.”
• “Don’t use footnotes for parenthetical comments.”
• “The caption of a regression table should have the regression equation and the name of the variables, especially the left hand variable.”
• “Good figures really make a paper come alive, and they communicate patterns in the data
  much better than big tables of numbers.”
• “Much bad writing comes down to trying to avoid responsibility for what you’re saying.”
• “Clothe the naked ‘this.’ ‘This shows that markets really are irrational…’ This what?”

What are the three most important things for empirical work?  Identification, Identification, Identification. Cochrane also has a list of tips for explaining your empirical work.

1. What economic mechanism causes dispersion in the right hand variables?
2. What economic mechanism constitutes the error term?
3. Explain why you think the error term is uncorrelated with the right hand variables in economic terms.
4. Describe the source of variation in the data that drives your estimates, for every single number you present. For example, the underlying facts will be quite different as you add fixed effects. With firm fixed effects, the regression coefficient is driven by how the variation over time within each firm. Without firm fixed effects, the coefficient is (mostly) driven by variation across firms at a moment in time.
5. Think of reverse causality stories.
6. Consider carefully what controls should and should not be in the regression. Most papers have far too many right hand variables. You do not want to include all the “determinants” of y on the right hand side.

• High R² is usually bad — it means you ran left shoes = α+β right shoes +γprice.  Right shoes should not be a control!
• Don’t run a regression like wage = a + b education + c industry + error. Of course, adding industry helps raise the R², and industry is an important other determinant of wage (it was in the error term if you did #2). But the whole point of getting an education is to help people move to better industries, not to move from assistant burger-flipper to chief burger-flipper.

Cochrane, John H. “Writing Tips for Ph.D. Students.”

Soldiers have their gun, musicians their instrument and economists their pen.  Deft writing can elucidate the most esoteric economic ideas; poor writing is boring and impenetrable. Although few realize it, writing is the economist’s trade.

Deirdre McClosky’s Economical Writing is an entertaining, practical guide for any social scientist.  Below is a list of some the book’s quotable insights.

• “The big secret in economics is that good writing pays well and bad writing pays poorly.”
• “Poincaré’s good French and Einstein’s good German early in the twentieth century were no small contributors to their influence on mathematics and physics.”
• “The reader like the consumer is sovereign.”
• “The teachable trick is getting a first draft. Don’t wait until the research is done to begin writing because writing, to repeat, is a way of thinking.”
• “If you change the typeface of your draft, you will see it in a new light.”
• Read your work out loud.
• “At the end of a session, or at any substantial break, always write down your thoughts, however vague, on what will come next.”
• “A writer must entertain if she is to be read.”
• “Use titles for diagrams that state their theme, such as ‘All conferences should happen in the Midwest’ instead of ‘A Model of Transport Costs.’”
• “Footnotes should guide a reader to sources.  That’s all.”
• “English achieves coherence by repetition, not by signal.  Repeat and your paragraphs will cohere.”
• “What is written without effort is generally read without pleasure” – Dr. Samuel Johnson
• “…the object is not to write so the reader can understand but so that she cannot possibly misunderstand.”
• “Weak writers these days use too many commas.”
• “In revision the trick is to delete most commas before ‘the’…”
• “The most important rule of rearrangement is that the end of the sentence is the place of emphasis.”
• “The imperative is a good substitute for the passive, especially for taking a reader through mathematical arguments: ‘then divide both sides by x’ instead of ‘both sides are then divided by x.’”
• “…Be concrete.  A singular word is more concrete than a plural (compare ‘Singular words are more concrete than plurals.”
• “The rule is to query every ‘this’ or ‘these.’  Take most of these out.”
• “Be clear.”

I highly recommend this book to any social scientist.

• McCloskey, Deirdre N, 2nd ed. (2000) Economical Writing, Waveland Press Inc., Long Grove, IL, 98 pages.