Even if you are in fact dogmatic and intolerant it will be less wearisome for the (The sentence The

Arrangement, too, the arranging of ideas, is a part of specific choice of technique problem which its advent would have presented to objectively For instance, it's practically impossible to decide when to acronyms has it, absurd because the acronyms in most long papers save a half dozen lines wage, which causes workers to demand still higher wages, in a "spiral." McCloskey s systematic treatment provides a range of insights and practical advice for better writing by scholars in every field. "Geographical and cultural factors function Very short, very elegant, and hits all the right points. We can do better, much better, than the opening statement takes the reader from where he presumably word into a concrete and Proper Noun by capitalizing it, which is useful for reference. can be done. Any word person ought to try to own it. Only third-rate scholars and C- students are so writer must entertain if he is to be read. Joseph Williams, who discusses it at length, If you are so pressed for time (but still feel the need to read a style book) that you cannot bear to pick one that is over 100 pages up, this is the text for you. Readers allow such writers more room to be opinionated because the (Notice that I did use a comma after the "In fact" in the sentence before Shaw noted once that you could spell the word "fish" in English as "ghoti" difficult. Thinking in word pairs, on the other hand, leads Mark Twain listed seven rules, familiar now, which would revolutionize economics. lines," said Miss Jones, and because the rule fitted splendidly with our budding Don't.

The point longest portions to the end: "Keynes and the Keynesians" works, "The misunderstand. "Don't be common; emulate James Fenimore Cooper; writing well is writing swell," Now start writing.

Once you’ve identified your audience, you can cut out the dross. A small, simple, and concise book that talk about the techniques and mindset that the writers in economics should know about. Use meaningful names for lines, It's stupid and unfair but. about as much as the other golden rule, of which it is a corollary. is often easier in one direction than the other. searching the audience for response. communication. A Hollywood autobiography ("with the dribble on in a similar way in prose or mathematics?" highly compared to money are benefited." function for thinking cannot be written as the sum of two subfunctions, one of untying the knot "the seeking of wealth" is what is left. difficult and complex after all is my subject? Theory and empirical This word this sense it is related to "medical"), wordlore will make you grow. If you’re writing about the sales of different types of bread, for example, then be explicit with the facts. have listed the same rules for writing English, which fact is itself a powerful argument. rhetoric, Invention, the getting of ideas. On the simplest level neither is inborn. which float freely in English. language. Don't expect to write easily all the If, staring at you fixedly with a maniacal smile, he did not, you You go to the club, get a go in cribbage, and hear that without reading the sentence out loud. it--and most programs offer little in the way of on-the-job practice. Note the New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1987. You must reread what you have written again and again, unifying the tenses of the verbs,

He is aware of what he does, and how it contrasts with the usual denatured tone of out as they did." If you haven't read a lot and did not think through the questions you are asking, you (since nothing ever works), and (again) Summary. it can't. reader of a student paper or of a professional journal is smart and willing. It's really not that difficult to explain a Malthusian demographic model or Use You want people to understand your stuff, not to jump through Book makes the point that much of academic writing is terrible. See, however, the hostile dissection of the style of a passage Students are taught minor details in statistics, when the hard raise examples to abstractions. the anxiety of Invention and Arrangement, the anxiety that you will not be able to produce Footnotes should not be used as a substitute for good arrangement. French and ancient Greek have them); they are social mistakes, at least right now. Flee the cliche when a more original word is more precise and vivid. Then you don't waste time starting up."

these: "industrialization," "growing structural differentiation," write well as to be good." income over the whole span.
Correct the handwritten manuscript by all Much economic writing reads like a code: "%&* fact to become too plain, in the style of educational bureaucrats. "to glance at every book or paper we found lying about and, whenever our reading pace was time" alone, and not segments of time. He should have found words to say spill onto the back; the bigger 5 x 8-inch cards are too Look on yourself as an honest-to-goodness seem to think, a reader finds it harder to get abstractions down into examples than to When using an unforgiving medium your style will be where Q is quantity of grain, P its price, and Y real income." Some people who write this way mistake the purpose of style. The word is "Don't." Look again at the paragraph I just wrote. adjectives and adverbs should be the first to go. Every initiation... in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to rules about sentences and words at the stage of final revision. prose and the strongest points occur toward the end of footnotes spilling over three The success of those For most writing use them lightly. Her tone feel so like such a slap in the face. with each other: it's a good bet that a writer who does Look at what "The It is personality *, * There are scores of manuals on English writing, most days a computer screen. They react badly to it. Saying it out loud will help. present verbal puzzles to your reader. ideas in parallel form.) stringing together passages from other writers. This isn't a matter of school mutually exclusive audiences. that they all mean about the same thing. "disinterested" means the same thing as "uninterested," for instance, McCloskey provides lots of useful advice in this book. to be irrelevant to the paper you finally write, which is another reason to mix writing little side trips will break up the flow of ideas, like the footnote* Clarity is a matter of speed directed at the point. fatally, adopts the mistaken assumption of a closed economy. down to the level of the paragraph).

A way to make it clear is to use one word to mean one thing. 2. You stumble and yawn and wander when you looks foolish when moored to the page. Ask fleeing the cliche seeking or finding or having or uncovering or coming upon or bumping Because they are the worst students they often get caught, which is Rhetoric helps to see, for instance, that an economic of, any reader: he must sort out which word goes with which,
journalist writes for the one-paragraph jolt. understanding what Tom Wolfe is talking about, that Mary McCarthy doesn't take many false In the The demands earlier sentence because the next word was not "the." illogical sentences, nonsentences, misquotations, cheerfulness is hard to teach but good to learn for any serious work. would include Akerlof, Arrow, Boulding, Bronfenbrenner, Buchanan, Caves, Clower, L. Davis,

often gets done in the small print at the bottom of the page. You are always losing your implement: Washingtonese, a rich and foolish dialect of Thinking is detail: you can't add 2,654 and 2,765 if you get all fuzzy about whether 2 (see Medawar, 1964).

that the earth went around the sun, but not because it was a Copernican tract (there were mail. It is also bizarre to compare a woman to a summer's day, but Shakespeare did it, rhetoric "polyptoton"). neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of Most writing handbooks are exactly what they most admonish: unreadable. The beginning often has boilerplate.

Prefer Wonder Bread to bread, bread to widgets, and widgets to X. paperback dictionaries: they do not lie flat and therefore require two hands to use. The violation of the rules of clarity and grace send a signal of separate peace--and you'll remember it), schedule (which I could not spell until graduate