Economic students know that writing in economics differs from other types of writings. You have to strive to reach clear results in the end. This will help you emphasize the analyses you conducted and underline the research quality.
These papers usually contain a lot of numbers, formulas, proofs. But you can be free in choosing the style of writing. You normally take your time to write an economics paper. It will not work to compose it a night before the deadline.
Main Aspects of Quality Research
Getting started
Whatever you do, the most difficult thing is to begin. This applies to write economic research papers too. When you begin writing an economics paper, it is best to begin with finding and reading the materials and writing a section when you summarize and analyze the materials you used in your research. This will show that you understand the topic well and can operate other researchers conducted before you.
Forming the structure
Unlike other types of papers, in economic one, you should devote several paragraphs in the beginning to formulating the research questions and information used for their formulation. It may seem a bit dry, but this is a good way of showing that you know your subject and provide the plan for further research.
Achieving clarity
Most likely, you will not be able to be completely clear on your first try. But if you keep revising and improving your research paper, you will definitely manage it.
- Use an outline to present your argument that will be summarizing all your ideas
- Identify the terms you will be using
- Set up the hypothesis and present the anticipated conclusions
- Do not be too wordy
- Keep improving your paper until it becomes clear and easy to understand
- Write your sentences in the active voice
- Use the positive form for your statements
- Use the same tense when you write your summary
Managing your time
Time management is one of the most useful tools for writing winning papers. If you don’t do it, be ready to fail the deadline or a good paper. Here are the stages you should follow:
- Find an interesting topic
- Begin researching
- Write an outline fist
- Proceed to draft
- Revise and improve
Using the proper language
The majority of Ph.D. students are mathematicians who made economic search papers very mathematical. It means you will be using math language for writing. You will be using a lot of models. Models show the work of a particular economic phenomenon. Predictions of the future of the past provide by models serve as an important empirical hypothesis. It is difficult to test economics in the conditions of an experiment. This is why they often use information collected from the real world – periodical reports, balance sheets, etc. This allows testing the predictions of models and hypotheses.
Writing Process
Find an interesting topic
There is a vast number of economic topics and thousands of ways to find them. If you want to focus on a specific subfield of the discipline, be ready for a limited list of topics. In any case, it all should start naturally. You will just read fresh articles or look through the news. The most important is that you like the topic and it is interesting for you. This is half of the success. Your task should be making your fresh contribution to a particular niche of the discipline.
You will need the full list of requirements for your research paper. Try to use a practical approach to everything you do. It will help you manage everything – from time to organize your ideas into a winning paper.
You should start conducting your research as soon, and you choose the topic. The longer you wait, the more chances you will be driven away by other topics, fresh information, etc.
Begin your research
Empirical data and academic literature are the two main sources of information you can use for your economic research. Empirical data is the data that can easily be transformed into numerical form. Academic literature includes books or articles related to your topic.
Writing an outline
An outline, or else say, a plan is a guiding tool in your writing process. It helps to organize the materials you have researched and your own ideas. An outline consists of:
- Introduction
- Literature review
- Hypothesis and data
- Obtained results
- Discussion
- Conclusion
Literature review
The degree of your knowledge of the material used for the research is shown by the literature review. It will serve as the basis for your paper. When you make references to the scientific works published earlier, you should indicate the questions you are going to bring about and terms you are going to use.
Formulate the hypothesis
Your hypothesis should contain the problem to raise, and methods to solve it. All the data you use should be collected into a chart or a diagram. You should also mention the rouses of the information. If it is a term paper, you write, you might find it impossible to reach anticipated results. It is very ok, and you can accurately mention it in your conclusion. What is not acceptable is overloading your paper with facts that don’t have any supporting arguments.
Present the results
In your research paper, you will be making two decisions: the number of empirical results you should present and how you should reflect these results in your writing. Here are some tips for this case:
- Stick to the most important things. Make yourself extremely clear. No matter the level of knowledge of your audience, they will enjoy your clarity.
- Narrow down your results. You can group your results and present the most relative one, instead of presenting each analysis, you can make based on the data you have found.
- When you describe tables, graphs, etc., make sure you sound precise. You should devote the first and the last sentences of the section where you present your results to the general picture of how the data from the tables and graphs related to your topic.
Discuss your results
Predicate your results upon economics facts and researches. You should stick to the economic aspect of anything you describe, even if you write about politics.
Making references
In most cases, it is your supervisor who will define the type of source referencing. However, in economic papers, they generally do two types of referencing: in the section of the literature review and at the end of the paper.
