"Varanya's course has been one of the most useful experiences of my whole PhD. She taught me how to give order to my thoughts and my writing. Her course gave me a set of tools and an "algorithm" to put together a large number of concepts in a unified paper. I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in improving her writing skills!"

"I highly recommend Varanya's course to PhD students, especially in their pre-job market year. Varanya's methods helped me structure and polish my paper to make it more impactful. I have continued to use Varanya's "blue book" and methods in my research writing ever since. The methods make the task of writing less daunting, and even fun. Warning: after taking Varanya's course, "RAP" will take on an entirely new meaning ;)"

“Varanya’s writing course was one of the most intense, fun, and rewarding weeks of my grad school experience. She focuses on the stuff that really matters: how to distill your main argument and structure your paper for maximum impact. In addition to being invaluable tools on the job market, I have continued to apply these principles ever since, both in oral communication and when writing papers and slides.” 

“Effective written communication is the most important skill that is not formally taught in economics Ph.D. programs.  Varanya's class provides a structured framework for writing clear economics papers. It benefited me tremendously on the job market and on the papers I have written since then.” 

"The exceedingly strong praise I have for Varanya’s course comes from the fact that it provided me with a toolkit. Before taking the course, I could only identify a well-reasoned argument using the legal threshold of “I know it when I see it.” After taking the course, I had specific benchmarks and actionable tasks with which to improve how I convey my ideas. I learned how to structure an argument, and I acquired concrete skills for refining that argument to make it clearer and more persuasive. I could not recommend the course more highly." 

"Condensing a whole bunch of accumulated results into a coherent narrative is difficult, and Varanya's course provides an excellent set of tools to accomplish the task. It clarified both my writing and my thinking."

“In Varanya's writing workshop I learned a reasonably comprehensive algorithm for improving the clarity of my writing.  Based on experience reading and writing, I had picked up a general sense of properties that clear papers shared. Specifically, clear papers do a pretty good job of telling the reader why they need to know what the paper is telling them.  But the workshop gave me a more routinized set of tests to apply to my own writing to see if this is happening” 

“Thanks to Varanya's RAP method, I made extensive progress in how to motivate my job market paper and begin the introduction. I also learned a lot from her many recommendations, especially those on paragraph structure. My current and future papers will benefit greatly from her advice.” 

"I found Varanya Chaubey's writing course extremely helpful and recommend it highly. Varanya identifies the specific elements that contribute to successful economics writing and provides students with tools to implement each one. She was an incredible help on my job market paper. Thank you Varanya!"

"We hired Varanya several summers in a row when I served as Director of Graduate Studies to conduct a week-long bootcamp to assist our advanced Ph.D. students in writing their job-market papers.  I sat in on several of the classroom sessions and was truly impressed with Varanya’s bottom-up methodology for building a cogent and coherent economic treatise.  She first helps students understand what exactly it is they wish to communicate and then coaches them in how to write clear concise sentences, cohesive paragraphs, and compelling sections.  All of the students who participated benefited from the experience and for many of them it was nothing short of transformative.  One quote I recall from a student survey sums it up best, “Varanya’s methods not only taught me how to write like an economist, but how to think like one.”"