Economic writing

Taken from the blog of John Whitehead: http://www.env-econ.net/2010/03/economical-writing.html I read Economic Writing in graduate school and enjoy the executive summary every other year or so. Both are highly recommended. Here is the short version, based on the executive summary, and my own interpretation: 1. Choose a reader and stick with her. In other words, if you are writing for a non-economist dont use jargon or technical stu. If you are writing for an economist, dont explain the most basic stu. 2. Avoid boilerplate. In other words, dont cut and paste your own paragraphs. 3. Impenetrable theoretical utterances have prestige in economics, but shouldnt. In other words, write in English and try to avoid showing how smart you are. 4. The table-of-contents paragraph is an abomination to the Lord thy God. Oddly, McCloskey uses more than one religious reference (in another item he damns some writers to hell, with a capital H). But I say, is the TOC paragraph really THAT bad? Does god care if you waste journal space with a few sentences laying out the rest of the paper? 5. Tables are writing. This is a big one for me. One of my committee members told me that your data and regression tables should be standalone. Dont include your mnemonic in the list of variables; i.e., use Smoke less instead of SMKLSS. 6. There is no number 6 in the executive summary. 7. Dont overload your sentences. ... An English sentence has ... three parts: subject, verb, object. 8. Paragraphs should have a structure like (AB)(BC)(CD). The Bs and Cs are repetitions of the same thought/word. 9. Avoid elegant variation. If your key word is wetlands dont try to spice things up by referring to bogs, swamp and marsh. 10. The semicolon (;) means roughly futhermore; the colon (:) means roughly to be specic. 11. Weak writers these days use too many commas .... Bloggers are weak writers. 12. Rearrange the order or words and phrases of every sentence you write. Huh?** 13. The end of the sentence is the place of emphasis. Huh? 14. This-ism is becoming a plague. These bad writers think this reader needs repeated reminders that it is this idea, not that one, which is being discussed. Avoid this. 15. Watch out for bad words. For example: via, intra, and/or, respectively, thus, overall, basic, factor, etc. We had a nice discussion of respectively. I violate all of these rules in my own writing, Im sure. A few additional rules of my own: 1. No exclamation points. (This rule is not a rule for bloggers, by the way.) 2. No question marks. No multiple question marks. (This rule is not a rule for bloggers, by the way.) 3. Scientic writing is not creative writing (creative writing is what your blog is for). And, by the way, my students told me that the business writing and communication courses taught in the English department failed to cover writing a research paper. The course seems to focus on writing memos and resumes. Crap! **Each Huh? suggests I need to re-read Economical Writing.