The writing style in Economics is unique, much different from other disciplines in social science. Writing in economics has a high standard: highly concise, persuasive, concrete, and elegant. This uniqueness makes it difficult for writing instructors from other disciplines to teach economics graduate students. As a result, there is a big gap between writings in professional journals and writings of economics graduate students. Most economists learn it by doing along with their “publish or perish” career path. This course aims to fill the gap by focusing on style and structures, two keys to economics writing.

Research and publication process is not simply a function of the quality of ideas in our mind, the math we use in our modeling, but also of the language we chose to describe them. For writing economics, I don't mean rhetoric. I mean how one tells the research story and sells the paper to the academic readers. That is, writing economics is like writing stories that make readers wonder and keep reading pages by pages.