Research writers must convincingly argue that their work advances knowledge in a field. Yet few are formally taught how to do this.
Our courses—taught each year at a handful of universities—train researchers to do this in writing and in talks. The first EconScribe course was offered in 2012 to PhD candidates at the economics department at Columbia University. Since then, our courses have traveled to various departments, both physically and virtually. These include departments at Berkeley, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Michigan, Oxford, Princeton, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Vanderbilt. Our courses have also been taught at Harvard Business School and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Our approach has appealed to quantitative researchers in particular: we teach researchers to approach writing methodically right from the start of a project, just as they would the research itself; to use method and structure in the writing process not only to communicate ideas effectively but also to refine the underlying analyses. Our approach is therefore different from the approach taken by many traditional writing courses, which blend stylistic tips with structural advice and are thus relevant to later stages of the writing process.
If you would like to learn the method for building a research paper that we teach, you will find it presented in our introductory textbook, which is now available on Amazon. We encourage you to build a first draft using the method, ideally, by working alongside a peer or co-author.
Our self-guided research writing course is here! Use it to build a research paper of your choice.