Practically Written

A nice little reminder…

http://www.lifewithoutpants.com/someone-elses-middle/

My approach to writing this blog will be the same as my approach to writing articles – a practical one that focuses on getting something reasonable finished, instead of never getting something perfect finished. I think writing is hard, scholarly writing especially hard, and writing papers to submit to peer-reviewed journals super-duper hard. So, what I will do here is give you neither a broad and balanced overview of writing advice, nor a set of best practices carefully extracted from empirical analysis. Instead, I’ll tell you what works for me (sometimes), and what seems to work for others (sometimes) based on my experience with writing and with helping others write applied social science.

I will write about such issues as how to get started, how to structure an introduction, how to think about “front ends” of papers, how to develop hypotheses and propositions, how to decide if your paper is done, and how to write about the contributions your paper makes. I’ll also write about the writing process, including when free-writing can be useful, when outlining helps (and doesn’t), and how to think about your paper as a nested set of elements.

Like a busker, I also take requests. So, if there are challenges that face you in writing applied social science, let me know. I may not have an answer, but I might be able to point you in a good direction.

Thanks for reading.Tom

My name is Tom Lawrence. I’m a prof in the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. My aim with this blog is to develop a set of notes and thoughts on writing applied social science, in particular aimed at writing papers for submission to scholarly journals. I’ll also be posting more general thoughts, my own and others, on scholarly writing. If you have any thoughts or reactions along the way, I’d love to hear them in the comments section.

Thanks for reading.Tom