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Jim Brander's Rules of Writing (view source)
Revision as of 13:06, 6 October 2020
, 13:06, 6 October 2020no edit summary
<center><big>'''Jim Brander’s'''
'''“The Rules of Writing”'''
(As understood by his student)
:e. Do not personify inanimate things, particularly theories and hypotheses.
:f. The word ‘firm’ is preferable to the word ‘company’ in economic-oriented writing. ‘Enterprise’ is also acceptable, as is ‘organization’ in some contexts. In addition generally restrict the usage of the word ‘public’ (in the context of firms) to refer to the public sector (i.e. government firms), and use ‘publicly traded’ or ‘listed on a public exchange’ for publicly-held (as opposed to privately-held) firms.
==About the Rules==
These rules were given verbally by Professor Brander to one of his students (Ed Egan), over many months and many interactions. As the student made a new infraction, a new rule was added or amended. The causality of this was not problematic for either party. The rules are not complete, and it is possible that some rules may have been misinterpreted by the student. Certainly some of this document is inherently contradictory (see rule 5c.iii, for example). However, the student has posted it here in the hope that other students will find it of some use.
==Other Rules==
I recently found [http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pnikolov/resources/writingtips.pdf Plamen Nikolov's Writing Tips For Economics Research Papers]. Plamen is a 2013/14 job market candidate from Harvard Econ, and I found his writing tips compelling reading, particularly for empirical work.
[http://blogs.ubc.ca/khead/research/research-advice/formula Jim Brander's Introduction Formula] is available from [http://blogs.ubc.ca/khead/ Keith Head's Blog], and is highly recommended for those writing papers in economics and/or business.
