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How To Write Well - Greg Mankiw

The document provides writing guidelines for economists writing for a general audience, including keeping sentences short, avoiding jargon and unnecessary words, keeping writing personal and focused on key takeaways, and using simple language and examples that non-experts can understand.

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103 views2 pages

How To Write Well - Greg Mankiw

The document provides writing guidelines for economists writing for a general audience, including keeping sentences short, avoiding jargon and unnecessary words, keeping writing personal and focused on key takeaways, and using simple language and examples that non-experts can understand.

Uploaded by

Azure Pear Ha
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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How to Write Well

I am the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. I use these


writings to keep in touch with my current and former students. Teachers and students at
other schools, as well as others interested in economic issues, are welcome to use this
resource.

When I was CEA chair, I sent the following guidelines to my staff as they started drafting
the Economic Report of the President. A friend recently emailed me a copy, and I
thought I would share them with my readers. They are good rules of thumb, especially
for economists writing for a general audience.

ERP Writing Guidelines

 Stay focused. Remember the take-away points you want the reader to remember.
If some material is irrelevant to these points, it should probably be cut.
 Keep sentences short. Short words are better than long words. Monosyllabic
words are best.
 The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
 Positive statements are more persuasive than normative statements.
 Use adverbs sparingly.
 Avoid jargon. Any word you don’t read regularly in a newspaper is suspect.
 Never make up your own acronyms.
 Avoid unnecessary words. For instance, in most cases, change
o “in order to” to “to”
o “whether or not” to “whether”
o “is equal to” to “equals”
 Avoid “of course, “clearly,” and “obviously.” Clearly, if something is obvious, that
fact will, of course, be obvious to the reader.
 The word “very” is very often very unnecessary.
 Keep your writing self-contained. Frequent references to other works, or to things
that have come before or will come later, can be distracting.
 Put details and digressions in footnotes. Then delete the footnotes.
 To mere mortals, a graphic metaphor, a compelling anecdote, or a striking fact is
worth a thousand articles in Econometrica.
 Keep your writing personal. Remind readers how economics affects their lives.
 Remember two basic rules of economic usage:
o “Long run” (without a hyphen) is a noun. “Long-run” (with a hyphen) is an
adjective. Same with “short(-)run.”
o “Saving” (without a terminal s) is a flow. “Savings” (with a terminal s) is a stock.
 Buy a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Also, William Zinsser’s On
Writing Well. Read them—again and again and again.
 Keep it simple. Think of your reader as being your college roommate who
majored in English literature. Assume he has never taken an economics course,
or if he did, he used the wrong textbook.

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