Some Free Advice for Students Writing about Politics and International Relations

The following is some practical advice I’ve developed over the years for my students writing about politics and international relations. Some of it applies to writing in general, and some is particularly relevant to writing in the social sciences.

Perhaps a few of these suggestions will appear old-fashioned. I’ve given this some thought. No one wants to give out-of-date advice. But it’s good to know how a variety of writers might be inclined to judge your writing. Then, if you choose to ignore certain guidelines, at least you’re making an informed decision.

Now, here’s the first piece of old-fashioned advice. In formal, academic writing, don’t use contractions. I’ve used a lot of them in these first three paragraphs. There, I just did it again. By all means, use them on your own webpages too, and in other informal writing, but many editors regard them as too casual for published scholarship. So, don’t use them in scholarly papers. Do not.

Read on for more free advice (possibly worth what you paid for it).

Choosing a Topic

Sometimes, life (or your teacher) hands you a topic. Whenever you have a choice, though, pick a topic that interests you. If you don’t, your boredom will quickly become apparent to your readers.

Often, the best way to choose a topic is to seek an answer to an interesting question, and questions are more interesting when the answer is not obvious. It is tempting to start with what you already know, but use that only as a starting point. Writing only about what you already know is a recipe for boredom. Even when you know a topic well, there are probably things you still don’t know or understand about it. In fact, the more you know about a topic, the more aware you’ll also be of the limits of your knowledge and the more questions you’ll have. Focus on those questions. Can you find a way to answer a question that you still have about this topic? Do some research, develop an answer, and think about the arguments and evidence that will support your answer. Now you have a topic (and perhaps even an outline for your paper).

Undergraduates, take a break for a moment. Let me talk to the MA and PhD students. Rarely are undergraduate students invited by their teachers to write about whatever they like. As graduate students writing an MA thesis (or capstone paper) or doctoral dissertation, however, you have precisely this opportunity. Suddenly, the consequences and difficulty of choosing a topic seem much greater. So is the temptation to choose a topic you already know well. You might have decided to pursue a graduate degree, in fact, so that you could study and write about that very topic. If you already know the answer to your research question before you’ve carried out any research, however, then it might not be a compelling question.

Here is an example. I’ve lived in Japan for several years and witnessed big differences in the way women and men are treated in the workplace. If I were to write a paper about gender and Japanese office politics, however, these differences would not themselves be my topic. Of course, I could share my observations (though quite a few people have already written on this topic; see Yamaguchi, 2019), but I wouldn’t learn anything new. Instead, I would ask myself what I don’t yet know about this topic. Why, for example, do some women—admittedly, a minority of executives—nevertheless find great success in Japan’s corporate world? Are Japanese government programs to increase women’s representation in the workforce having any effect? There are a lot of things I still don’t know about this topic. Those would make good research questions.

OK, undergraduates, welcome back. If you read the above two paragraphs as well, good for you. You might be cut out for graduate school. If you didn’t, here is the short version: to find a research topic, look for a question you can’t (yet) answer. That will help you identify an interesting research question.

Three Quick Fixes

Almost every academic paper has one objective: to persuade the reader. If your readers are put off by confusing prose and grammatical errors, however, they will never get to your arguments themselves. People disagree about many things, including good writing, but avoiding basic grammatical and stylistic errors is a good place to begin. Set for yourself the goal of writing a paper with no grammatical errors. You would be surprised by how many students do not consider this an achievable goal.

Three simple tactics can help you avoid many mistakes. First, read your paper out loud from beginning to end. Your ear will often catch mistakes that your eyes do not. Second, ask at least one friend to read your paper, to circle errors, and to give you comments. And third, use (and learn from) your word processor's spelling and grammar checker. These strategies are just a beginning, but they will help a great deal. Failing to follow them tells your readers that you don’t take your writing very seriously. So, why should they?

Citing Sources Properly

You’re going to need to do some research. Once you do, you should cite the sources you use correctly. There are at least three reasons to do so. First, you should give credit where credit is due. Second, citations help scholars trace the lineage of ideas and verify research. Finally, there is the “bottom line”: if you don’t cite your sources, then you have plagiarized (meaning that you are effectively taking credit for someone else’s work). Professors don’t like this, and universities regarded it as academic dishonesty. Normally, a paper submitted for a grade will receive a 0 if it is plagiarized. Outside the classroom, the consequences are much worse. Just ask Jonah Lehrer, Jayson Blair, or former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

If you’d like to read up on how to define plagiarism, and how to avoid it, Northern Illinois University has a well-designed Academic Integrity Website with online tutorials that explain plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty.

You don’t want to plagiarize, though. You want to cite other people’s work properly. There are several different ways to do this. You may, for example, use “in-text” citations combined with a bibliography. In this case, cite the author, year, and page number of your source (whether of a direct quote or indirect inspiration) in parentheses, as follows:

For every President “since Eisenhower the presidency has been something of a disaster” (Lowi, 1985, p. 10).

Then, in your bibliography or references section, provide complete bibliographic information:

Lowi, Theodore J., The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

Alternatively, you could put a footnote or endnote at the end of the sentence in which you make use of information or a quotation from a source. Then, in the footnote/endnote, you can provide the bibliographic information.

There are many different kinds of publications you might cite, and several different standard formatting guides for citing them. In general, for writing in the social sciences, I recommend that you follow either the Chicago Manual of Style or the American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide. Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab also has an excellent collection of resources on research and proper citation. Whichever format you choose to follow, apply it consistently and be sure to provide all the required bibliographic information. I realize Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” but he wasn’t talking about footnotes (Emerson 1907).

Powerful Writing

It may not be possible to define powerful writing in a way that satisfies everyone, but it usually has these three qualities: it is clear, it is active, and it is concise.

In general, prefer the clear and specific in your writing to the vague and general. Instead of writing that “the US intervened in Cuba in 1961,” for example, consider writing that “President Kennedy authorized covert U. S. support for a brigade of Cuban exiles, who went ashore at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961.” True, the second sentence is a bit longer, but it tells us so much more about exactly who did what, when, and where. As a result, it comes alive as a description of what happened.

Avoiding the passive voice (when the verb acts on the subject of the sentence) will also help your writing to come alive. There are times when the passive voice makes sense, of course. Sometimes, you want to emphasize passivity: “I was just minding my own business, when suddenly I was struck by a flying poodle. It was raining cats and dogs.” Usually, however, it is better to emphasize action, and to explain exactly who did what. So, instead of writing that “a policy of deterrence was chosen,” write the following (which is more specific and uses the active voice): “President Bush sent US troops to Saudi Arabia in 1990 in order to deter further Iraqi attacks.” While we’re on the subject of verbs, try to replace linking verbs with active verbs as well. Instead of writing that “there are three reasons why the US invaded Grenada,” write: “The US invaded Grenada for three reasons.” In the second version, the US is actually doing something. This action wakes up your writing (and your readers).

Finally, omit unnecessary words. You could, for example, write the following: “one might argue, if we properly consider all the evidence, that C. Wright Mills was correct in his judgment that American politics is dominated by a power elite.” But all the work is being done by the last part of this sentence. Let it shine: “C. Wright Mills was right that American politics is dominated by a power elite.” Taking out little cautionary phrases like “I think” or “one might argue” makes your writing bolder and more powerful. In fact, I’m sometimes tempted to think that powerful writing is defined by ratio of what you have to say divided by the number of words you take to say it. The more you can say in a given number of words, the better.

Pronouns

This is one area where old-fashioned guides to English style definitely haven’t kept up. William Strunk and E. B. White’s classic guide, The Elements of Style, famously (or rather, infamously) advises us to use he as an all-purpose singular pronoun, and the Open Syllabus Project informs us that The Elements of Style is the single most-assigned text on American college syllabi. Yet most journal editors would advise us to use gender-neutral language (“he or she,” perhaps), or to rewrite our sentences to use plural pronouns. Instead of writing “when a president makes an important decision, he must seek advice,” we might instead write “when presidents make important decisions, they must seek advice.” Meanwhile, they—which has long been used as a neutral, singular pronoun—is increasingly accepted by editors, partly in recognition that not everyone adopts a binary gender identity.

Whenever standards are evolving, students will probably find that their professors give inconsistent recommendations. Faced with this challenge, the best advice I can give is to remember that writing always has been a strategic process. Your strategic objective is to convince your readers of something, and pronouns are just one strategic choice among many that you will make. If you want to convince people that your grammatical sensibilities are firmly rooted in 1918, when William Strunk Jr. first composed The Elements of Style, so be it.

While we’re on the subject of pronouns, remember that collective nouns are singular in American English. This is true even in the case of seemingly plural nouns like “the United States.” In Spanish, it may be los Estados Unidos, but the country located just north of Mexico is a singular thing in American English, best referred to as “it.” We have enough pronoun troubles already without referring to the United States as “they.”