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• Appointment Information
• Student Resources
  • Why Meet with the Writing Tutor?
  • Reading Suggestions for Students
  • Reading a Draft Together
  • What Grade Will I Get?
  • Writing Hand-outs
  • Guide to Writing Economic Theory
  • Economics Writing Manual

Talking about Writing: An Audio Documentary I want to record you talking about writing! Please email me at pauldude@duke.edu to schedule a time. Click here to listen to audio of students, staff, and faculty talk about writing.

The master-economist must possess a true combination of gifts. . . . He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher--in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.
--John Maynard Keynes

Reading Suggestions for Students
If you are interested in improving your writing, read Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams. Many of the writing principles I emphasize are contained in that book.

Researching a topic? Students who are beginning to research an economic topic may find the entries in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences helpful. For an electronic index to and abstracts from the International Encyclopedia, click here. Other references works that may be useful are The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics; The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics; and the Survey of Social Science: Economic Series. All are in the university library.

Appointment times are in the afternoon, Tuesday through Friday. You will receive a confirmation email when the calendar system has scheduled you. The tutoring office is in Room 223 in the Social Science Building, on West Campus. APPOINTMENTS MUST BE SCHEDULED 24-HOURS IN ADVANCE!

Please be on time for your appointment. If you do not show up on time for your appointment, the Writing Consultant may conclude that you will not show up at all and will therefore consider the appointment to be canceled. If you are going to be late, please call the tutoring office at: 919/660-1898. If you need to cancel or reschedule your appointment, please do so through the online appointment calendar.

Students should bring the written instructions (if available) for the assignment to the sessions. If the student has already prepared a draft and would like to go over it, he or she should bring to the session two copies of it (papers cannot be readily printed or copied on site).

This service complements the tutoring provided by the university's Writing Studio. If your native language is not English and you want help with English-language problems, please schedule an appointment with the Writing Studio. The Writing Studio has an English As A Second Language (ESL) specialist on its staff.

To schedule an appointment with the writing tutor, click here.

Useful Handouts
Following are links to useful handouts on writing-related subjects. If you would like the tutor to create a handout on a topic that is not listed, please send an email to writing@econ.duke.edu and make your request.

• Getting Started How to Write a Paper , Identifying and Narrowing a Topic
• Thesis Statements Thesis Statements
• Introductions Writing Introductions , Annotated Introduction (4-Move Pattern)
• Literature Reviews Writing Literature Reviews , Finding Materials for a Review, Annotated Literature Review
• Data Writing about Data
• Findings Writing about Your Findings
• Documentation and Sources Citing Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism , Evaluating Sources
• Tables, Graphs, and Figures Designing Tables , Writing about Tables
• Book Reviews Writing Book Reviews
• History Papers Writing a History of Thought Paper
• Honors Papers Checklist for Revising Honors Papers
• Writing Itself Four (Easy) Steps to Better Writing , Making Arguments , Emphasizing Main Points , Giving Shape to Your Prose , Achieving Flow in Your Writing

Writing Process
The writing process may be thought of as involving planning, researching, drafting, revising, and proofreading. The process should not be thought of as linear (you plan first, then you research, then you write a draft, etc.), but as discursive. That is, the steps could occur in any order, could overlap, and could repeat themselves. When you are revising, for instance, you could very well discover that you need to conduct more research, or modify your plan. You may plan a little, then conduct some research, then return to planning your paper.

Planning
Planning a paper involves many things: determining the purpose of your paper, identifying its audience, and understanding the circumstances under which the paper might be read; identifying the subject of the paper, and then narrowing the subject; and formulating a preliminary thesis statement or research question. Planning may involve selecting a strategy for developing your essay. Will you use narration, or description, or explanation? Will you show cause and effect? Will you compare and contrast, or classify and divide material? Will you need to define your terms? Will you use some combination of some or all of these strategies?

Researching
Researching a topic is best accomplished by first consulting sources that treat your topic generally and then eventually working your way to sources that deal with particular aspects of your topic. You want to form an overview of your topic, to get a feel for how much work has been done on it, who the leading authorities are, what the major issues are, what questions are asked and which are still unsettled. Begin then by consulting the many economics encyclopedias in the reference library. Here are a few titles to get you started: The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics; The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics; Survey of Social Science: Economic Series; and the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (for an electronic index to and abstracts from the International Encyclopedia, click here). Ask the reference librarian for titles of other economics reference books. Next browse two economics journals that often contain up-to-date surveys of important topics: the Journal of Economic Literature and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. As you consult those sources, compile a bibliography: keep a running list of articles and books that seem relevant or worth checking on. Take notes as you read.

Once you have consulted encyclopedias and the JEL and JEP, you will be in a position to search a useful electronic bibliography of the economics literature, EconLit. EconLit is accessible through Perkins Library's Web site. For more on EconLit, see Identifying and Selecting Materials for a Literature Review.

Drafting
To successfully draft a paper, write quickly and don't stop to think or to correct any mistakes. The point is to generate a whole lot of text, to create the raw material for successive drafts and the final paper. Write whatever you can write, in whatever order it comes to you. Do not worry about starting with, say, the introduction or any other section. Simply begin writing. The very act of writing will get your juices flowing and will help generate new ideas and connections between ideas.

Revising
Revising is where writing really takes place. Revising involves what are known as higher-order concerns. When you revise, you examine and reconsider your topic, your thesis statement or research question, your evidence, your organization, your conclusions, your purpose. Does your paper fulfill the requirements of the assignment? Is the topic stated in your introduction the topic you actually write about in the rest of your paper? Have you forumlated your thesis statement or research question as accurately and clearly as possible? Do you need more evidence, or evidence of a different kind (or both)? Does your paper contain digressions or redundancies that should be deleted? Should you move the paragraphs on pages 4 and 5 to pages 9 and 10? Does your introduction begin effectively, or does it take too long to get to the point? Those are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself as you revise. Note: Do not confuse revising with proofreading!

Proofreading
Whereas revising deals with higher-order concerns, proofreading involves what are known as lower-order concerns--sentence-level issues, word choice, puncutation, grammar, spelling--and primarly involves hunting for errors: spelling, punctuation, grammatical, factual. It also involves checking your citations for internal consistency and for completeness. That study by Smith you refer to on page 17: is it in your reference list at the end of your paper? Those statistics you mention on page 3: do you cite their sources? Every paper should be proofread before it is handed in.

Identifying and Selecting Materials for a Literature Review
Your literature review should discuss articles (and perhaps books) in the professional economics literature, that is, articles published in scholarly economics journals, written almost always by economists on university faculties (as opposed to, say, staff economists working for a corporation or the government). Generally speaking, articles in popular news magazines, newspapers, and the like are not considered part of the professional literature, nor, usually, are articles in other fields (psychology, sociology, political science, et al.).

You will be best positioned to identify and select materials for your review once you have sufficiently narrowed your topic. Once you have done that, the best tool for identifying the relevant literature is EconLit . EconLit is a search engine that is devoted to economics only. It indexes all of the major scholarly journals in economics, as well as working papers and book reviews. EconLit extends to the present and goes back to 1969. EconLit is not a full-text database, providing instead only bibliographical information. You can use that information to retrieve the article itself. Again, make sure you have sufficiently narrowed your topic before searching EconLit ; otherwise, your search will likely yield far too many results.

On that note, do not use a general search engine such as Yahoo! or Google. Not only will your search turn up an overwhelming number of results, but many, if not most, of the items found will not be scholarly.

If your search of EconLit still yields a large number of results (say, thirty or more), you will need to select a manageable subset of articles to review. Begin by browsing the reference lists and skimming the literature reviews in the articles you have found. Are there any articles that are cited repeatedly? Those are likely to be among the most important in the field. You can actually find out the number of times a given article has been cited by other articles, by consulting the Social Sciences Citation Index, available electronically via the ISI Web of Knowledge. Consider the journals in which the articles were published; articles published in the core journals may merit more weight than those published in other journals. Chronology may be another criterion; you may wish to assign more weight to the most recently published articles.

You may also find it helpful to browse or search two journals that often contain surveys of topics in the economics literature, the Journal of Economic Literature and the Journal of Economic Perspectives . (Perhaps your EconLit search will turn up articles in those journals.) If you find a survey article on your topic, pay attention to the articles and researchers who are mentioned. Notice who wrote the survey article; that person is likely to be a leading scholar in the field. Are several of the articles in the survey written by the same person? That person is likely to be a leading scholar as well.

Keep in mind that you may not always find articles that deal exactly with your topic. If your topic is income mobility among teenage single mothers in the 1990s, you may find that there are studies of that topic in the 1980s (or earlier), but not in the 1990s. Or you may find that there have been studies of the income mobility of single mothers, but not necessarily of teenage single mothers. That's OK. Use whatever studies are most relevant, even if they do not deal with your precise subject. When you write your literature review, simply remember to point that out ("As far as I can determine, there are no studies that look at income mobility in the 1990s, but there are several that examine it in the 1980s, and I will discuss those studies now . . .").

To learn more about identifying and selecting materials for a literature review, please schedule an appointment with the EcoTeach writing tutor (www.econ.duke.edu).

Scholarly Journals
Scholarly journals, be they economics journals or journals in some other field, contain articles written for other scholars in the field (as opposed to a general audience). The articles are often peer-reviewed; that is, before a paper is accepted for publication, one or more scholars in the field read the paper and attest to its scholarly merit. Articles in scholarly journals have a certain look: sources of evidence, ideas, and quotations are always cited, usually in footnotes or endnotes, or using in-text author-date citations that correspond to a reference list at the end of the paper. Articles in scholarly journals use the specialized language of the field and often have a sober, serious look (little white space and no inset quotations, glossy pages, and the like). Journals indexed by EconLit can be considered scholarly.

Core Journals
Core journals are, simply put, the most prestigious scholarly journals in a field, the scholarly journals with the highest status. In a 1995 article published in the Journal of Political Economy, George J. Stigler, Stephen M. Stigler, and Claire Friedland identified the following as the core journals in economics: the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Review of Economics and Statistics.