Scientific Writing

Annotation: While rigor, clarity, and concision will be valued in any piece of writing in political science, knowing the kind of writing task you have been assigned will help you to write a good paper. Lecturers use research paper assignments as a means of assessing your ability to understand a complex problem in the field, to develop a perspective on this problem, and to make a persuasive argument in favour of your perspective. In order for you to successfully meet this challenge, your research paper should include the following components: an introduction, a problem statement, a discussion of methodology, a literature review, a description and evaluation of your research findings and a summary of your findings. This course will give you an elaborated description of each component. It will break up the challenge of writing the research paper into seven major tasks that map into the sections of the paper. Literature: - Baglione, L. 2018. Writing a Research Paper in Political Science. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. - Becker, H.S. 2020. Writing for social scientists: how to start and finish your thesis, book or article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - Cuba, L. 2002. A short guide to writing about social science. New York: Longman. - Graff, G. and Brikenstein C. (2009) They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. New York: WW Norton. - Lasswell, H. D. (1936) Politics: who gets what, when, how. New York, London: Whittlesey House, MacGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. - Scott, G.M., Garrison, S. M. (2011) The political science student writer´s manuel. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. - Turabian, K. L. (2018) A manual for writers of term papers, theses, and dissertations: Chicago style for students and researchers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Annotation: Literature reviews identify, classify, and explain the most important scholarly answers to important research questions. In order to develop students as political scientists the course is organised around debates on important topics in our subfield. This school-of-thought approach will help students to think through and evaluate the quality of the logic of a perspective. In addition, as we assess different explanations, students will need to consider the appropriate evidence for each account, learning that certain pieces of information have purchase on some but are irrelevant to others. Moreover, advancing schools of thought and then evaluating their explanatory power across cases will help students to expand their analytical skill.

Annotation: After crafting a literature review we are ready to advance a model and state a hypothesis. In putting forth a model, one often chooses an argument that one believes is strongest, based on one´s findings in the literature review. We will map the relationships between the concepts that follow from our contention. In identifying the model, we arrive at the analytical bones of our argument. Reducing a school to its basics by determining the model, figuring out exactly how the concepts affect each other is important. Developing a hypothesis that explicitly states the ways in which one variable can affect the phenomenon in question is a very important learning experience. Focusing attention on the underlying models and arguments in course readings will enhance the students´ ability to uncover these relationships themselves.

Annotation: Once we have identified a puzzle to study (literature review) and have developed a preferred approach for accounting for what we observe (a hypothesis or argument) writing the introduction highlights the research question. The introduction renews our focus and serves as a springboard for the rest of the project. In this section we communicate a succinct question as well as explain why it is interesting and important to political scientists, policy makers, and citizens. If we cannot state our puzzles briefly or our questions are of little importance to scholars, practitioners, and/or ordinary people, then we have to revise our work. Next to this backward-looking function, introductions propel us forward into the rest of our papers because this also contains a road map for the text. This means students have to begin identifying their methodology and case studies (research design) at a very early stage.

Annotation: Preparing a research design that both maps out the plan for conducting the research and provides justifications for choosing the precise direction selection typically requires some facility with logic and social science methodology. The research design section needs to define the concepts and establish a strategy for conceiving of or measuring them, select the cases for study, identify the data sources, and if necessary, provide the instruments for generating information (such as surveys, interview questionnaires etc.). As we decide how to accomplish these tasks we must provide a discussion defending our choices. In the end students learn to recognise that their findings are only as good as the compromises they have made.

Annotation: Whether we perform qualitative or quantitative analysis (or some combination of the two), the analysis and assessment section performs three basic functions: First, it provides the evidence or data related to the thesis/argument/hypothesis. For correlational or causal arguments, this involves examining the factors that were purported to affect the outcome as well as the actual phenomenon itself. Second, we need to determine what the significance of all this information is for the thesis/argument/hypothesis. Does the argument appear to be supported, contradicted, or can no judgment be rendered? And third, we need to explain the reasons for reaching a precise conclusion on the thesis/argument/hypothesis.

Annotation: A good conclusion ties the paper together by restating the thesis and where the weight of the evidence falls, remind the reader why this question and case(s) are important to study and what the findings mean for different audiences, and muse on the versatility of the thesis, considering whether it could reasonably apply to other cases. In addition, in the conclusion we should return to some of the “best decisions” that we made in our research design to consider the ways in which our choices affected our findings. When the results are surprising or disappointing, thinking about whether and how measurement strategies, case selection, or methods affected the outcomes is especially critical. Eventually, a good conclusion points the direction for future research.

Annotation: Before we consider a piece completed students need to engage in extensive revising and editing. Revising is a process that occurs on the macro-level and entails the rethinking of the ideas and structure of the paper: is the thesis written precisely enough to capture exactly what we mean and what we evaluated?; and does the logical structure of the sections and paragraphs effectively make our argument? Editing is another important process that students need to make habitual. Paying attention to revising, as well as editing, not only enhances our skills and the quality of our work, but also helps us understand through experience that writing and thinking are interconnected processes. Finally, the tasks of revising and editing help reinforce the idea that improving any skill requires attention and practice over a period of time.