By this time in the semester, students in my labor class should be making real progress on their research papers. While trying to think of ways to help them, I came across this fabulously detailed guide, written by Plamen Nikolov, on how to write papers. It's funny that a lot of these things I don't even think about anymore. I guess they just come naturally (well, sometimes) after years of reading papers. But the students in class need to write a paper now, and so these tips will hopefully be useful.
Some favorites:
1. Keep sentences short. Monosyllabic words are best.
2. It is not necessary to cite every single paper in the literature. The main point is to set your paper off against the 4-5 most closely related current papers.
3. Leave policy implications to the introduction and conclusion.
4. It is better to acknowledge shortcomings than to make overly broad unsupported statements.
Colleagues, what are the most annoying/funny mistakes your students make when writing their first paper?
No comments:
Post a Comment