Psychology Paper

The Challenges of Writing in Psychology

Psychology writing, like writing in the other sciences, is meant to inform the reader about a new idea, theory or experiment. Toward this end, academic psychologists emphasize the importance of clarity and brevity in writing while minimizing descriptive language and complex sentence structure. The best writers of psychology have the ability to make complex ideas understandable to people outside of their area of expertise. When you write a psychology paper, you are, above all, writing to convey factual knowledge that is supported by research. You are striving to be precise, and thus you should expect every word you write to be read literally. Psychology writing can be very dense, with many references to previous research. Writers of psychology almost never directly quote a source. Instead, they distill the essence of the idea or finding, and cite the appropriate source. In the...