Paper-writing tips
Linguistic Field Methods · Spring 2005

Think of a paper that you write in this course as something more like a science lab report than like a literary essay. This philosophy affects both the style and the structure of the paper.

• Your linguist audience will be more impressed by well-organized thinking and clarity of discussion than by flowery language. An elegant writing style can sometimes be a nice thing, but not if it comes at the expense of clarity.

• Be sure to use standard linguistics terminology where appropriate.

• If you need to cite a source, give the author's name and publication date in the body of the paper (not in a special footnote), and include a bibliography of sources at the end of the paper. Examples:
  • Chomsky (2001) has a lot to say about syntax.
  • This phonological principle was first applied to tone languages (Leben 1973).

• Remember to edit and proofread your paper. Typing and grammar mistakes are distracting. Rereading your paper will also help you find places where your ideas could be stated more clearly.

• Breaking your paper down into numbered sections, sometimes with numbered subsections, helps make the structure of your argument very clear.

• Always start your paper with a statement of the research question you have addressed -- the "point" of the paper -- and a brief summary of the answer that you have found. Don't worry about giving away the punch line. Your readers will thank you if you tell them right away what your arguments are leading up to; this helps them follow your discussion. (One way to do this is in an Introduction section at the beginning of your paper.)

• After you have stated your research question and a summary of your answer, much of the rest of the paper will be about giving your readers evidence to support your conclusions.

  You should do this with data and discussion. State each piece of the argument clearly. Wherever relevant, immediately show data that supports your claim. That is, don't rely on a huge chart of data in one place in your paper -- organize the data into subparts and put it where it needs to be to show your reader that your claim or description is justified.

  In this class, "data" might consist of words, phrases, or sentences of Korean, or it might consist of tables of quantitative measurements from Praat, depending on what kind of point you are currently making.

• If your research for the paper required you to:
  • choose or classify items from our class corpus of Korean
  • make measurements in Praat
  • or otherwise make decisions about what to look at or consider
  ... be sure to explain your methodology (perhaps in a separate Methodology section near the begining of the paper).

  For example, suppose you have restricted your analysis to monosyllabic nouns. You would want to include points like the following in your Methodology section:

  • What was the reasoning behind that decision? Why are monosyllabic nouns a useful or appropriate context for your research question?
  • What criteria did you use to determine which words were nouns?
  • Were there any cases where it was hard to tell if a word had one syllable or not, and if so, how did you reach a decision?

• Use linguistic formalism in your discussion (such as a rule, a set of features, a syntactic tree structure) where appropriate. But also, be sure to state in plain English what your use of formalism is intended to show. This is important because (a) formalisms can go out of date and be hard for later generations of linguists to read, and (b) you may have made an error in your formalism, so the prose statement is a backup device that tells the reader what you actually wanted your formal analysis to do.