In our statistical communication class today, we were talking about writing. At some point a student asked why it was that journal articles are all written in the same way. I said, No, actually there are many different ways to write a scientific journal article. Superficially these articles all look the same: title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, or some version of that, but if you look in detail you’ll see that you have lots of flexibility in how to do this (with the exception of papers in medical journals such as JAMA which indeed have a pretty rigid format).
The next step was to demonstrate the point by going to a recent scientific article. I asked the students to pick a journal. Someone suggested NBER. So I googled NBER and went to its home page:
I then clicked on the most recent research paper, which was listed on the main page as “Employer Violations of Minimum Wage Laws.” Click on the link and you get this more dramatically-titled article:
Does Wage Theft Vary by Demographic Group? Evidence from Minimum Wage Increases
with this abstract:
Using Current Population Survey data, we assess whether and to what extent the burden of wage theft — wage payments below the statutory minimum wage — falls disproportionately on various demographic groups following minimum wage increases. For most racial and ethnic groups at most ages we find that underpayment rises similarly as a fraction of realized wage gains in the wake of minimum wage increases. We also present evidence that the burden of underpayment falls disproportionately on relatively young African American workers and that underpayment increases more for Hispanic workers among the full working-age population.
We actually never got to the full article (but feel free to click on the link and read it yourself). There was enough in the title and abstract to sustain a class discussion.
Before going on . . .
In class we discussed the title and abstract of the above article and considered how it could be improved. This does not mean we think the article, or its title, or its abstract, is bad. Just about everything can be improved! Criticism is an important step in the process of improvement.
The title
“Does Wage Theft Vary by Demographic Group? Evidence from Minimum Wage Increases” . . . that’s not bad! “Wage Theft” in the first sentence is dramatic—it grabs our attention right away. And the second sentence is good too: it foregrounds “Evidence” and it also tells you where the identification is coming from. So, good job. We’ll talk later about how we might be able to do even better, but I like what they’ve got so far.
Just two things.
First, the answer to the question, “Does X vary with Y?”, is always Yes. At least, in social science it’s always Yes. There are no true zeroes. So it would be better to change that first sentence to something like, “How Does Wage Theft Vary by Demographic Group?”
The second thing is the term “wage theft.” I took that as a left-wing signifier, the same way in which the use of a loaded term such as “pro-choice” or “pro-life” conveys the speaker’s position on abortion. So I took the use of that phrase in the title as a signal that the article is taking a position on the political/economic left. But then I googled the first author, and . . . he’s an “Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.” Not that everyone at Hoover is right-wing, but it’s not a place I associate with the left, either. So I’ll move on and not worry about this issue.
The point here is not that I’m trying to monitor the ideology of economics papers. This is a post on how to write a scholarly paper! My point is that the title conveys information, both directly and indirectly. The term “wage theft” in the title conveys that the topic of the paper will be morally serious—they’re talking about “theft,” not just some technical violations of a law—; also it has this political connotation. When titling your papers, be aware of the direct and indirect messages you’re conveying.
The abstract
As I said, I liked the title of the paper—it’s punchy and clear. The abstract is another story. I read it and then realized I hadn’t absorbed any of its content, so I read it again, and it was still confusing. It’s not “word salad”—there’s content in that abstract—; it’s just put together in a way that I found hard to follow. The students in the class had the same impression, and indeed they were kinda relieved that I too found it confusing.
How to rewrite? The best approach would be to go into the main paper, maybe start with our tactic of forming an abstract by taking the first sentence of each of the first five paragraphs. But here we’ll keep it simple and just go with the information right there in the current abstract. Our goal is to rewrite in a way that makes it less exhausting to read.
Our strategy: First take the abstract apart, then put it back together.
I went to the blackboard and listed the information that was in the abstract:
– CPS data
– Definition of wage theft
– What happens after minimum wage increase
– Working-age population
– African American, Hispanic, White
Now, how to put this all together? My first thought was to just start with the definition of wage theft, but then I checked online and learned that the phrase used in the abstract, “wage payments below the statutory minimum wage,” is not the definition of wage theft; it’s actually just one of several kinds of wage theft. So that wasn’t going to work. Then there’s the bit from the abstract, “falls disproportionately on various demographic groups”—that’s pretty useless, as what we want to know is where this disproportionate burden falls, and by how much.
Putting it all together
We discussed some more—it took surprisingly long, maybe 20 minutes of class time to work through all these issues—and then I came up with this new title/abstract:
Wage theft! Evidence from minimum wage increases
Using Current Population Survey data from [years] in periods following minimum wage increase, we look at the proportion of workers being paid less than the statutory minimum, comparing different age groups and ethnic groups. This proportion was highest in ** age and ** ethnic groups.
OK, how is this different from the original?
1. The three key points of the paper are “wage theft,” “evidence,” and “minimum wage increases,” so that’s now what’s in the title.
2. It’s good to know that the data came from the Current Population Survey. We also want to know when this was all happening, so we added the years to the abstract. Also we made the correction of changing the tense in the abstract from the present to the past, because the study is all based on past data.
3. The killer phrase, “wage theft,” is already in the title, so we don’t need it in the abstract. That helps, because then we can use the authors’ clear and descriptive phrase, “the proportion of workers being paid less than the statutory minimum,” without having to misleadingly imply that this is the definition of wage theft, and without having to lugubriously state that it’s a kind of wage theft. That was so easy!
4. We just say we’re comparing different age and ethnic groups and then report the results. This to me is much cleaner than the original abstract which shared this information in three long sentences, with quite a bit of repetition.
5. We have the ** in the last sentence because I’m not quite clear from the abstract what are the take-home points. The version we created is short enough that we could add more numbers to that last sentence, or break it up into two crisp sentences, for example, one sentence about age groups and one about ethnic groups.
In any case, I think this new version is much more readable. It’s a structure much better suited to conveying, not just the general vibe of the paper (wage theft, inequality, minority groups) but the specific findings.
Lessons for rewriters
Just about every writer is a rewriter. So these lessons are important.
We were able to improve the title and abstract, but it wasn’t easy, nor was it algorithmic—that is, there was no simple set of steps to follow. We gave ourselves the relatively simple task of rewriting without the burden of subject-matter knowledge, and it still took a half hour of work.
After looking over some writing advice, it’s tempting to think that rewriting is mostly a matter of a few clean steps: replacing the passive with the active voice, removing empty words and phrases such as “quite” and “Note that,” checking for grammar, keeping sentences short, etc. In this case, no. In this case, we needed to dig in a bit and gain some conceptual understanding to figure out what to say.
The outcome, though, is positive. You can do this too, for your own papers!