Last updated on April 21, 2018
One of our PhD student, whose work focuses on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, writes:
I would like your opinion on something. When I presented this [paper] in the past, I have received requests to include more background slides and information on SNAP (history, participation rates, eligibility rules, etc.), the poverty line (how it is calculated, etc.), as well as diff-in-diffs (parallel trends). I did not have these details included as I thought most people know this stuff but that was obviously not the case for a few people who saw me present the paper in the past. Yesterday, however, I have received some feedback about that information being redundant. This is not my job-market paper, but as I prepare for job-market talks, what do you suggest I do? Include background on the more common concepts and methods or skip them? Do you have some general advice in deciding how much of that to include?
Yes, I do, and my advice is simple: Everything you do when it comes to scientific communication is with the ultimate goal of being understood.
One thing I have learned in life is that most people love to be taught what they already know; it’s comforting to most people when what they hold as true is confirmed as such. Another thing I have learned is that most people will blame you when you try to teach them something and they just don’t understand it–and rightly so.
As a result, you are significantly more likely to lose readers (or audience members) if you explain too little than if you explain too much. That’s why your articles and talks should be geared toward the average PhD economist, i.e., someone who has the technical know-how to understand what you are doing but does not know why you are doing it, or why they should care (this latter part is especially important when talking to economists, who understand the opportunity cost of time more than just about anybody else).
My colleague Wade Brorsen, who used to edit the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, had a really neat piece titled “Comments on Agricultural Economics Research” last year in the Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, in which he wrote the following:
I recently had a discussion with one of my students about the goal of writing. He said that the goal was to impress. In particular, to impress people with the technical difficulty and precision of the work. I argued that the goal was to be understood: you have done something useful and you want to communicate it to others. I may be idealistic, but I am not going to change.
Likewise. When I started out as a new assistant professor in 2006, I thought scientific communication was all about impressing your reader with your technical skills. Turns out that the reader doesn’t care about your technical skills–at least not in the fields in which I have been doing work. It’s probably natural for many doctoral students to think that what is rewarded is technical difficulty and precision, given that they spend the first two to three years of their doctoral studies investing precisely in those skills. As a consumer of research papers, I wish more dissertation advisors encouraged their students to invest in writing clearly as much as they invest in their technical skills.