Our self-guided research writing course is here! Use it to build a job market paper this summer.

We offer courses in writing and speaking. So far, our courses have been taught at Brown University, Chicago Booth, Columbia University, Duke University, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Oxford University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, and Vanderbilt University.

DEPARTMENTS & FACULTY: why should you

SPONSOR a WRITING course?

We think there are three reasons for departments and faculty to sponsor courses in research communication.

1. Students need these skills to have the fairest chance on the academic job market.   They receive exposure to ideas and standards that reflect the broader audience of the job market.  

2. Faculty should not have to waste precious time trying to decipher poorly written papers.    

3. Since clear writing requires clear thinking, teaching people to write clearly is one way of helping improve the quality of research.

To suit different departmental needs and budgets, we offer a few different options.  If you would like to learn more, please get in touch at admin@econscribe.org.  

Our courses have helped different students in different ways.  Below are excerpts from anonymous surveys conducted at the end of a course or from emails sent after a course.  At the bottom of this page, you can also find a packet of student evaluations.

"Your writing workshop is more than writing. It has reshaped the way I think about my research, organize ideas, and market my contributions to the literature."

"...As a result, I made modifications to my estimation strategy and had to reestimate and rewrite many parts of the paper."

"Although I felt the course allowed me to significantly improve the writing of my paper, the biggest contribution was actually how the course forced me to rethink the underlying logic and argument presented. By "building up" from an outline, I was able to see where there were logical gaps in my paper, and therefore where additional analyses or some rearrangement could help drive the argument home for the reader...Needless to say, the paper is much improved as a result". 

"The workshop also clarified the main contribution of my paper to me. I had not really realized that I had 2 contributions and therefore tried to push them simultaneously. The course helped me to prioritize one contribution over other and structure the paper correspondingly."

"General audience accessibility, in particular, was something I hadn't considered before, for two reasons: First, I spend most of my time reading specialized field journals. For some reason, I assumed that that's how to write a job market paper. Second, I present my work about 4 times a year to a very specialized audience in my lunch group, in which we are actively discouraged from introducing material accessibly ("skip to the model!"). The writing class taught me that I was terrible at motivating and introducing my ideas to a general-interest audience and gave me a set of tools to fix this problem."

"At first I thought my paper was just about X, that the topic may only get people in the field excited. Through revising the introduction almost every day, I’m thinking that the paper fits into discussion of the more fundamental problem of X and Y. The writing helps me get to this deeper level as it let me think about how readers will take the paper and better understand the problem."

"These are the big picture improvements I made to the paper in the past week: rephrased the sets of findings to one main clear and interesting research question; integrated the research question, findings and contributions into the abstract, and positioned the paper early in the introduction; threw out the irrelevant sections and planned an outline to focus on the main question."

Students: why should you

take a WRITING course?

In research, time is of the essence: the time you take to make your point to a busy and bored audience; the time you take to produce a decent draft.  We train you to be efficient on both counts.  

Our courses teach you to

•Craft the most compelling argument for your research, quickly.  For instance, you can phrase your research question in many different ways. But how do you figure out which way is best? Then, how you do position your findings in the literature?  These are strategic questions that we will teach you to think through, methodically.

•Develop convincing answers to make-or-break questions.  If someone asks you, "Why did you assume this instead of that?" you can answer in many different ways but some are more compelling than others; the difference can come down to how you craft content into a message.  We will help you craft more logical and therefore more memorable answers for your audience.

•Make high-impact revisions to your job market paper.  For example, the first few paragraphs of the Introduction or of a key section can seem like extremely dull murder mysteries to the reader.  We teach you how to use the space in your paper better and make foot-in-the-door revisions.

“I feel, dare I say, excited about the market.”

EMAIL if you would like to learn more about our courses.