Some general paper-writing advice for students who are going on the job market next year (though this advice can be applied to any paper).
(No, it's NOT too early to be writing up your JMP!)
(No, it's NOT too early to be writing up your JMP!)
First and foremost, writing up your research results is difficult. Thus, prepare to spend a lot of time on it and do not worry if it is going slowly. If writing seems easy to you, you are either a prose genius or doing it wrong.
If you haven’t started writing up your JMP yet, but you know what it is going to be, I suggest you start now and write a little bit every day. Starting now will give you the time and space you need to think carefully about how to structure the paper and polish your writing.
How do you start writing? Find 3-4 recent papers in your area that published well and study their structure carefully. How do the authors pitch the paper? How do they discuss the literature? When in the intro do they discuss the results? Into how much detail do they go?
Do they discuss the data or the empirical framework first? How many footnotes does the paper have? What kinds of details are in footnotes versus in the main text? How many tables and figures are there? What kind of information is in the table/figure notes?
Where are the shortcomings of the research discussed? How are they discussed? And so on. You don’t have to figure all of this out up front. Rather, you should refer to these “model” papers for guidance periodically as your write your own paper.
Next, make an outline of your paper based on these “model” papers and start filling it in. Obviously, you shouldn’t copy-paste text from other papers, but imitating their overall organization is fair game.
As uninspiring as it is to be formulaic, you are probably not going to come up with a better structure, and it will make writing the paper much easier.
A key part of the outline are the tables and figures your paper will have. Once you have the tables and figures figured out, it will be relatively straightforward to write the paper around them because you know where you are going.
Avoid censoring yourself when writing the first draft. If you expect the first set of sentences to be perfect, you will feel demoralized and progress will be slow. It is much easier to allow yourself to write whatever comes to you and polish it later.
Do not worry about the grammar, the style, or even completeness. My first drafts often have X’s, Y’s, CHECKs, and CITE! all over them.
Once you have a first draft, start going back over it and polishing. Fill in those X’s and Y’s and other incomplete parts. Think about whether the flow makes sense (consult model papers!), make your tables and figures prettier, clean up the grammar. Repeat several times.
Do not feel like you have respect your original choices when editing. If you think of a new table/figure, add it in. If it seems like a table/figure should now be deleted or moved to the appendix, do it. If a paragraph no longer seems useful, delete it.
Do not try to have long (2+ hours) but infrequent writing sessions. There are some people whom this works well for, but for most of us shorter (30-60 minutes) but frequent (daily) sessions will work better because writing requires a lot of concentration.
To summarize: start writing early, write often, and don’t reinvent the wheel. In fact, I didn’t reinvent the wheel with this writing approach, it was passed onto me from various sources over the years. You’ve got this!
