137 search results for "writing"

Tom Reardon is one of my favorite agricultural economists. Not only is he incredibly productive (he has over published over 150 articles and his work has garnered over 27,000 Google Scholar citations), his work also has real-world policy impact (he was the first agricultural economist invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos). Over the years, Tom has been a wonderful mentor, and he has become a very good friend.

To know Tom is to love him, and if you know Tom well, you know that he has laser-like focus when it comes to his research, but that it can be hard to get him to focus on something that is not the writing of whatever he is currently working on right now. Over dinner, he is likely to go from discussing the etymology of an obscure French word to how e-commerce is disrupting food systems to how he has been struggling to make good brisket sous vide… all within five minutes!

So I was particularly happy to receive an email from Tom earlier this week in which he linked to a talk in which he focuses 75-minutes on the art of research discovery and writing good articles. If you are a researcher, whether early-career or seasoned, this is one of those rare occasions where a master craftsman takes the time to generously share some deep insights into his craft.

In economics and related disciplines, discussions about whether one should be using Microsoft Word* or LaTeX to write one’s papers are roughly like discussions about the gender of angels in theology–everyone has an opinion, and few are willing to change their mind in response to other people’s reasons for preferring one or the other.

One of the arguments that I have often heard for preferring LaTeX is that even though it takes more time to format a document in LaTeX, it looks more professional, which in turn might even signal (however subliminally) technical competence to journal editors and reviewers, and so it remains optimal to use LaTeX even though one can only do so at relatively higher fixed (and often variable) cost.**

But it looks like it is possible to have your cake and eat it too. I was at the University of Illinois to give a talk a few weeks ago, where my colleague Scott Irwin gave me a copy of a new paper of his titled “The Case for Writing Papers in Economics Using Fake LaTeX.”

Here is the abstract:

Courtesy of one of the students in the second-year qualifying research paper seminar I am co-teaching this year, here is an article by John Kenneth Galbraith–the most famous Canadian agricultural economist–published in the March 1978 issue of the Atlantic, in which Galbraith discusses the things he would like to teach about writing.

Everyone who writes as part of their job should read the article in full, but here is a précis in case you are too busy to read the whole thing: