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In January 2023, I participated in the EconScribe Research Paper Workshop, an asynchronous session led by Varanya Chaubey. She is also the author of The Little Book of Research Writing, which helps structure your papers. In this post, I summarize the key lessons from the workshop.

The Cookbook

Suppose you have some preliminary results for your paper and you want to start writing. In fact, you might have taken Jesse Shapiro’s advice seriously and have started to write an introduction for the paper you aspire to write.

If this is the case, I would recommend the following steps (which I have been using for my other papers since the workshop). For details, I highly recommend reading the book or taking her workshop if it’s offered at your school

1. Complete the R(esearch question)-A(nswer)-P(ositioning statement) template. For every paper, you can write several of these.
   1. A answers R
   2. P makes space for R. Readers can infer what is worth knowing that is as yet unknown; what the state of the nearest literature is.
   3. P provokes no idle questions that are not answered in A.
2. Write the part 1 of the introduction. Part 1 welcomes the reader in by positioning the paper: by showing what space it occupies in the literature and why it would be a valuable addition to that literature. It should follow the logic of P from your RAP. It typically has structurally non-typical paragraphs.
3. Write headings and takeaway messages for all sections and subsections in your paper. The takeaway message for a section should be 1-3 sentences (fewer for a subsection, say 1-2 sentences). It should answer the urgent question provoked by the heading and link that answer to the RAP. If the wrong urgent question is being provoked, the heading should be revised.
4. Write part 2 of the introduction. Part 2 should prepare the reader for the body. A good rubric is that if you take the first sentence of each paragraph, it should tell you a story. In addition, some stuff from the previous paragraph should also appear.

After these four steps, the resulting skeleton draft is an extremely useful and informative benchmark for your full paper.