Comments on: Good writing in political science

By: Henry

Henry — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:35:59 +0000

I have made some small changes to the text. I may make larger ones later – but those who are impatient and want to do their own remixes of the text to incorporate their own ideas are very welcome to. Lots of versions to play around with. If people want to do a ‘community mix, to incorporate some of the other suggestions’ I have set up a page at http://jottit.com/wbr7p/ href=”http://jottit.com/wbr7p/” rel=”nofollow”>http://jottit.com/wbr7p/ which people can play around with (since Jottit uses Markdown, this took all of 30 seconds). I am also fine with people getting rid of the attribution to me if it gets to the point (unlikely, I suspect, but I would love to be wrong), where most of my text has been altered or has disappeared.

salient – thanks for the suggestion – change has been made.

zebbidie – I think that indirect writing is a particular problem for social science writing, where you want to identify the possible causal relationships as specifically as possible. The sentence that I quoted was not in the passive voice, but was indirectly written. I have spruced up the language here a bit to avoid the wrath of Language Log as best as I can.

Mor – thanks – change made.

By: Don't Quote Me on That

Don't Quote Me on That — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:24:40 +0000

Here’s another piece of advice: If your sentence begins with the word “this,” your sentence probably needs rewording. This is a nearly universal rule.

By: Salient

Salient — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:06:44 +0000

Glad to hear it was useful, Ciarán; trust me when I say that the most important / useful piece of advice was the copying and pasting “Thanks for the update!” part. (And the part about reminding them that it’s not an avenue to complain about how much work there is to do or to fill you in about every last thing that happened in their life to delay/distract from their work.) Deep reading and thoughtful replies to each email can consume entire ten-hour days fast. (Of course, there’s probably student benefit to be gained from such replies, but the time cost can be truly intense, and it took me a while to get into a low-time-cost rhythm each Monday. And actually, at first my students complained about having long replies from me to read each week, helpful or not, so I didn’t feel at all guilty transitioning to a kthxbai reply motif.)

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:17:19 +0000

Donald/Deirdre McCloskey's The Writing of Economics (Macmillan, 1987) is very good on this subject as well -- and really for graduate and professional levels. Also her "Economical writing" available here .

By: Ciarán

Ciarán — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:31:37 +0000

Thanks to Salient for that excellent idea re update emails. I might implement that, with a quick in-person progress review two thirds of the way through the semester or the like.

By: Eszter Hargittai

Eszter Hargittai — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:10:05 +0000

Kieran wrote the following helpful writing guide a while back [pdf]:
http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/teaching/methods2.pdf

I think he targeted it at undergrads although I think this may work better for grad students. Regardless, it has some very helpful thoughts on how to approach writing a research paper. (The focus is a bit different from some of what’s above, but I figured it was still worth a pointer given how helpful it is regarding its focus.)

By: Steven

Steven — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:17:29 +0000

In terms of structure and presentation, etc.—the things you concern yourself with—happy poli sci essays are indeed almost all alike. Meanwhile, the ways for an essay to be sad are infinite. This is all I disagree with. Otherwise, very good stuff.

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:30:41 +0000

Henry, good prioritizaton of excellence synergizing and process flow excellence is acknowledged by many to be an excellent synergistic priority; however, implementation methodologization and program evaluationalistic synergizing is considered to be of higher importance, by many others. The lexigraphical analyses and exemplification expressed above is considered to be sadly lacking in such methodological implementation structuring, and no mention of program evaluationalizing can be found, even after considered, careful, painstaking re-reading and re-re-reading. It is strongly desired that such operationalizing of the above items be woven into the next revision of this draft piece.

By: mor

mor — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:58:14 +0000

Henry:
You move from ‘prefer’ as the student’s predilection to ‘prefer’ in an injunctive sense eg. “prefer straightforward sentence structures”. It jars. We are passive before our preferences but active in our choices so ‘choose straightforward etc’ or ‘use’ or ‘select’. Rational choice reliably rewarded will create preference. In time, in time…

By: Steve K

Steve K — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:50:42 +0000

Henry, this is all generally good advice, but it seems to me to be more like a general “how to write a good college paper” guide than “how to write a good poly sci paper.” The advice applies just as well to an English paper as it does to a poly sci paper. Can you think, for instance, of conventions that are specific to poly sci papers, but are different from other undergraduate papers? For example, I expect my literature students to spend a lot time in their papers closely examining particular passages from the books, and I also want them identifying underlying contradictions in the novels. I don’t think other disciplines emphasize those things so much.

By: Salient

Salient — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:42:52 +0000

(Oops! I didn’t avoid a data dump and landed myself in moderation, probably for immoderate length. Sorry for that, here’s a more amenably short retry.)

A possible revision to the read-it-aloud suggestion for students: Have someone else read it aloud as well.

I was surprised by how poorly my grammar represents the sentence flow and inflection that I imagine in my own head, and by how clunky my sentences can sound to a reader; that’s made me much more attentive to punctuation over the years.

By: zebbidie

zebbidie — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:32:52 +0000

is that really passive voice and is passive voice really weak and limp sounding? isn’t that a holdover from Strunk & White and therefore won’t Language Log be handing you your arse on a platter?

I genuinely want to know this – I’ve read rant after rant on LL and I am still no more confident in identifying a passive construction than when I started. : /

By: Salient

Salient — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:31:14 +0000

A possible revision to the read-it-aloud suggestion for students: Have someone else read it aloud.

Was I ever surprised to learn that my interpretation of commas[,] and of sentence flow in my own sentences[,] is largely unshared by the rest of the world. The sentences which seem to sweep along so nicely in my own mind and voice turn out to be awfully horribly clunky.
—-

If a student waits till (late in) the night before the paper is due to start working, the result is unlikely to be happy.

Tired of blogs is surely right that one thing many undergraduates don’t do is start early enough.

True. In case anybody out there’s an instructor frustrated by this and interested in countermeasures,¹ someone suggested I require students to keep time logs and provide weekly email progress reports, with a specified subject line like Essay 2 Week 5 (in the email body: what have you done, how long did you spend on it). So I did! Short summary: the final work was better than normal in terms of median grade, had less bluster than normal, was more polished and attentive to the structural requirements than normal, and more students verified their understanding of assignment expectations with me than normally happens, but OTOH, students need it made clear that it’s not a space for them to type long excuses for what they haven’t done, and it was hard at first to resist spending hours each week carefully reading the progress reports instead of speedskimming them.

Students felt the pressure of an artificial deadline each week, and making the reports count for 2% of the grade made them feel significant to the student without imposing anything on me as instructor. The truly unmotivated might not bother to get anything done each week, or will fib, but who cares; a large swath of students responded productively to the pressure. And of course, a handful of students got excited about the chance to go on and on about their findings and ideas informally, and will therefore put more hours into the pre-writing contemplation and exploration that make for a better final product.

There’s not a lot of minimum overhead on the instructor side, just weekly check marks and a fuller email inbox, unless one makes the mistake I did and tries to attentively read and carefully respond with pertinent advice to every weekly progress report—the maximum overhead is unbounded. By the end of the semester it was a quick skim, a “Thanks for keeping me updated!—Sal.,” optionally a comment to ask me the questions in person before class if questions were included for me, and on to the next one…

It helps that I teach ed students, who as a group seem more a little amenable to these kinds of procedures, but the idea seems adaptable for any long assignment. I don’t know, maybe this wasn’t worth going on about.

¹(This is not to assert that it is or should be an instructor’s job to provide motivational services, I don’t have an opinion on that.)

By: otto

otto — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:41:11 +0000

One thing I think undergrad students in IR could really benefit from would be, where that is the bent of the course, a short or punchy reading which would bring out the need to stick to positivist/explanatory approaches to IR outcomes rather than make normative arguments. It’s a continual curse to have students drifting into writing about what the US should do in international politics when the essay questions are about explaining why the US does the things that it does, and if anyone has a good reading that works to prevent this, I’d love to hear it.

By: Philip

Philip — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:37:54 +0000

I think it might be useful to write about the stuff before you get to writing the essay. A typical experience for me, as a student, would be like this. I would go to lectures and seminars and get an idea of what the Professor is interested in and what their views are, there might even be part of the course that I was particularly interested in. I might be given a list of topics or titles for the essay. I wouldn’t want to argue against the Professor’s views especially in their area of interest. I would see it as an easy option to make arguments similar to the Professor’s, obviously you would have to go into more detail than had been covered in the sessions. Sometime I would choose a topic I thought would be interesting that I didn’t know too much about, but wanted to find out more. This is opposed to a topic where I knew more about but didn’t find interesting. That was a risky strategy as I might write a better essay as I was more interested in the subject though it might be worse if I didn’t have enough time for sufficient reading.

By the time I’d chosen a topic I would have read some relevant literature and have an idea about other things to read. I would then read in more detail, make notes, select good quotes etc. Somewhere during this process I would know what points I would want to make or argue against. Ideally then I would try and put them in a structure, maybe reconsider my arguments, insert my notes, flesh them out, a bit of editing then I’d have an essay. Often though the, make a structure, flesh out notes, and reconsider arguments, stages were interchangeable.