| Jim Whitney | March 16, 2011 |
McCloskey: The Writing of Economics
A. Writing priorities: Your choices for the two "writing priorities" columns may differ from each other since you may already do a good job of meeting some of what you consider to be Dr.J's top 6 general priorities. Your own top 6 choices should be tips that you think would be most helpful in further improving your own writing.
| Writing priorities | |||
| Your top 6 tips for improvement | Dr.J's top 6 priorities | ||
| 1. | Writing is the economist's trade | ||
| 2. | Writing is thinking | ||
| 3. | Rules can help, but bad rules hurt | ||
| 4. | Be thou clear | ||
| 5. | The rules are factual rather than logical | ||
| 6. | Classical rhetoric guides even the economical writer | ||
| 7. | Fluency can be achieved by grit | ||
| 8. | Write too early rather than too late | ||
| 9. | You will need tools | ||
| 10. | Keep your spirits up, forge ahead, and the like | ||
| 11. | Speak to an audience of human beings | ||
| 12. | Avoid boilerplate | ||
| 13. | Control your tone | ||
| 14. | Paragraphs should have points | ||
| 15. | Make tables, graphs, and displayed equations readable | ||
| 16. | Footnotes are nests for pedants | ||
| 17. | Make your writing cohere | ||
| 18. | Use your ear | ||
| 19. | Write in complete sentences | ||
| 20. | Avoid elegant variation | ||
| 21. | Watch how each word connects with others | ||
| 22. | Watch punctuation, weeding out excess commas | ||
| 23. | Switch around the order until it sounds good | ||
| 24. | Read, out loud | ||
| 25. | Use verbs, active ones | ||
| 26. | Avoid words that bad writers love | ||
| 27. | Be concrete | ||
| 28. | Be plain | ||
| 29. | Avoid cheap typographical tricks | ||
| 30. | Avoid this, that, these, those | ||
| 31. | Above all, look at your words | ||
B. Most memorable passage from the reading: