Academic Writing: Exercises and Guides on Writing

This website will host a number of exercises and guides for graduate (and undergraduate) students to improve their writing. The website will (hopefully) become a resource for professors, teachers, and graduate students to learn and practice how to write good well. In the future, I will add practice problems for parts of the paper writing process, e.g., writing introductions, abstracts, framing, etc. Much of these guides and exercises build, of course, on the work of others. This website is work in progress. Suggestions for additions or improvements are always welcome.

Caveat: most of these guidelines are written with (quantitative) empirical papers in mind, but may still be useful to others as well.

Guidelines for writing well

This page contains helpful tips, assembled from a variety of sources

Getting Started, Links to helpful resources:

An (Incomplete) List of Academic Guides (blog posts) to Writing in Political Science (in Alphabetical Order):

Writing Advice for Academics – by Prof. Wendy Belcher

Between the Introduction and the Conclusion: The “Middle Bits” Formula for Applied Papers - Marc F. Bellemare

Explorations of Style – by Prof. Rachael Cayley

Writing for Research – by Prof. Patrick Dunleavy

Some Tips on Writing Style and Avoiding Common Errors in Political Science Papers – by Prof. Patrick Egan

Writing as a Social Scientist – by David Eil

The Introduction Formula – by Professor Keith Head

How to Write – by Prof. Macartan Humphreys

How to Write an Empirical Social Science Paper – by Prof. Kosuke Imai

How to Write a Publishable Paper as a Class Project – by Prof. Gary King

Three Templates for Introductions to Political Science Articles – by Prof. Andrew Little

The Thesis Whisperer - by Dr. Inger Mewburn

Improving your academic writing: My top 10 tips – by Prof. Raul Pacheco-Vega

Caltech Rules for Writing Papers – by Prof. Barry Weingast

(Some) Books on Academic Writing:

Fowler, Alastair. 2006. How to Write. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

Goodson, Patricia. 2017. Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing. Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA.

McCloskey, Deirdre N. 2000. Economical Writing. Waveland Press: Long Grove, Ill.

Silva, Paul J. 2017. Write it Up: Practical Strategies for Writing and Publishing Journal Articles. American Psychological Association: Washington, DC.

Sword, Helen. 2012. Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.