I am concluding a semester-long experiment in incorporating a theory/policy writing simulation of sorts into my doctoral level “Human Security” seminar. This struck me as important both because my own doctoral training left me unprepared for writing for practitioners, and because the divergent socialization of academic professionals into scholarly versus non-scholarly writing has been cited as a key impediment to successful communication with those to whom our ideas and knowledge could conceivably matter.
In fact since “human security” is both an academic field and a policy domain this question about the role of epistemic communities in human security policy-making was an important intellectual touchstone all semester. We began the term with a bunch of readings on the theory/policy divide. But I wanted to make it more concrete by showing them precisely how the intellectual and editorial process differs across these two communities, giving them some practice at navigating that tight-rope, and allowing them to observe first-hand the trade-offs in their own intellectual process – especially since this is a big part of what we claim to be doing here at UMass in the IR field:
 We encourage applied research and help students develop the skill-sets necessary for interacting effectively with scholars and with policy practitioners at local, national, and global levels.Â
To do this, instead of asking them to write research papers, my students were required to go through the process of convincing Foreign Affairs Magazine to publish their analysis of some policy-relevant topic on the basis of existing research. Their essays were required to be timely, accessible pieces bringing to bear the latest relevant knowledge from the academy on a important policy problem. (They chose things like how to implement the responsibility to protect, and whether international law should go after states who support dictators.) This required them not only to actually know where to find, interpret and articulate the latest relevant social science knowledge on human rights, humanitarian affairs and international law compliance, but to master a different kind of technical writing and editorial process than what we were otherwise teaching them. (The bigger writing assignments in class were critical reading reactions and practice comps.)
By all accounts, it has worked pretty well: students have claimed to have (mostly) enjoyed and learned from it, and on balance they did as well on the assignment as on more standard scholarly papers.* So I am here to share the recipe with the rest of you (plus what I learned along the way), in case you want to try it or provide feedback as I retool for next year.
Here’s what I put in the syllabus:
The purpose of this assignment is to a) demonstrate mastery over a particular topic in the human security literature b) demonstrate the ability to summarize what is known by social scientists on that topic and c) practice communicating one’s findings in the context of a policy-relevant argument in a style intelligible to lay readers and foreign policy elites. The student must also make a short, empirically informed presentation of the argument (15 minutes) at the end of the semester.
Here’s how it worked:
1) The Pitch. Students were asked to start by pitching their idea as a 3,000-word essay to Charlie Carpenter, a fictional FA editor. (They worked from the pitch template Jon Western and Joshua Goldstein used to sell their article on humanitarian intervention to the magazine, which Jon and Joshua were kind enough to share.) Students selected a topic, identified and studied the scholarly literature with a bearing on the causal claims in question, formulated a policy argument on that basis, and made the case that as an academic they had a contribution to make to the debate.
2) The Rejection. Upon sending in their pitch letters, each student received a terse note from Charlie Carpenter rejecting the idea for the print magazine, but offering them a chance to write 750-word op-eds for the website instead. The students were now tasked with doing all of the above but in even fewer words. The “editor” also reminded them to avoid jargon, use lots of examples, and to mention (but not belabor and definitely not footnote) the relevant social science studies supporting the argument, and gave a very short deadline – a turn-around time of about a week. Where needed the editor gave a few bits of substantive feedback as well, especially pushing students on their causal claims.
3) The Web-Essay. After scrambling for a week to formulate their argument and turn in their web essays, students received an optimistic note from the editor, accepting their piece and promising to “work on it” and send them a revised copy “for their approval” shortly.
4) The Copy-Edits. A few days later, students each received their essay back as an attachment, with significant editorial changes introduced: throat-clearing excised, sentences shortened, jargon reworded, superfluous paragraphs stricken, footnotes omitted. In brackets, students were instructed to add in illustrative examples here and there, a supporting reference to some study the editor is only guessing might exist, or a clarification. Often the student’s argument had been radically reworked. And in every essay at least one significant substantive error was introduced by “the editor.” [NOTE: I made sure to send these letters back on Friday, so the students had all weekend to panic, react in shock to having their writing tampered with by the prof, and wonder if they were misunderstanding the assignment. But in the following class session, I made it clear what the expectations were going forward: to work within the structural constraints suggested, but to push back enough that the resulting argument was the author’s own, and that the resulting prose was consistent with the author’s own understanding – and with all relevant facts. We also had a very fruitful illustrative discussion of how different this hands-on editorial approach – common in beltway journals – is from the norms of academic peer review and feedback, and what that means structurally for the production of knowledge among foreign policy elites.]
5) The Revisions. Students turned in a second version with many but not all edits accepted. They also had to write an email explaining what they were pushing back on and why. The final essays were graded on content, organization, structure and style according to this rubric. Finally, students made pithy, visually engaging presentations of their projects in class.
Based on both their feedback and the quality of the outputs, I found all this worked well at achieving a number of learning objectives. It impressed upon students the importance and difficulty of weighing in as scholars with some knowledge of social science evidence relevant to foreign policy debates. It gave them a sense as to what types of editorial norms they’d encounter and skill-sets they’d need to deal with beltway editors effectively; and when coupled with some intensive socialization in academic writing throughout the rest of the course, it helped them understand what was distinctive about both these different styles and the editorial process at academic journals. It made them write more concisely, which will also help them in scholarly writing. And it gave them at least a simulated understanding of the dynamics they had read about.
But I’ll do some things differently next time.
First, I think the projects will benefit from doing more than one iteration of editorial tug-of-war, especially since students are ultimately being graded on how well they manage this set of interactions to produce a well-written piece that improves through editorial feedback but is nonetheless still theirs after various attempted direct edits from the prof. This means intentionally introducing changes that they will reject, and starting earlier allows more time to be creative in this. For the extra work, the assignment probably should be worth more points, though it’s important that the grading criteria reflect the student’s active and skillful participation in the editorial tug-of-war process as much as the final output.
Second, when sending back the edits, I’ll accept all the changes first and let the students figure out what I did. Sending them back with track changes on was (I was told) unhelpfully psychologically jarring.
Third, on presentations day, the students simply presented their projects as students, but next time I’ll have us dress up and role-play a CFR not-for-attribution panel discussion on the various topics.
What else should I continue, change or add? Comments from colleagues or other profs are welcome, but I’d especially like to hear from graduate students and also non-academic editors about how we can best prepare the next generation of political scientists to communicate effectively across the theory-policy divide if they choose – while using exercises like this to generate a discussion about whether, and how much, that’s our job as social scientists.
*The student with the highest grade in the class has been invited to submit their essay as a guest post here at the Duck. Stay tuned.
Wow, you rock! Thanks for telling us how this is done. This is most helpful given my transition to teaching more policy-oriented classes next fall.
I do a lot of this with my students. In my intelligence class, they write a 5 page memo to the president recommending a specific change in some aspect of US intelligence policy; they do short reaction papers in response to a policy report from a group like CRS, Carnegie, etc.; they do policy briefings for the class; and when they present their end of semester projects, we do it in a conference style presentation format. I invite people from the policy community (we have a lot of military folks in our neck of the woods) to attend their final briefings and this FORCES students to figure out how to present their ideas to laypeople, without the jargon and shorthand that we are so comfortable with. We have a lot of military students, and it’s interesting to find out that people who struggle with regular academic writing are actually superb oral briefers, and write great policy memos. Â
Mary: is this a grad or undergrad class? If grad, doctoral-level or applied masters?
Does FA really end up changing to argument in their editorial comments or was this just part of the exercise?
Yes. But to be fair I think it’s rarely intentional.Â
Fantastic initiative. Fwiw, I’d leave the track changes. It is more realistic, and will save getting blind-sided by it later.Â
I think it’s more realistic without them, actually. I don’t usually see my excised prose in beltway copy-edits. But I’m not thinking of nixing it altogether, just sending the “Final” version so they have to switch it back to “Final With Markup” instead of the other way around.
Screwing with your students by letting them panic all weekend is pure evil genius. “bow”Â
To be fair, the student who finally emailed me for a clarification / reassurance did receive one. Â
Very, very cool. This is probably a better model–in a much simplified way–for undergraduate papers than “research papers.”
I do recommend short policy memos or informed op-eds for undergrads rather than research papers. However I would not recommend this particular format for them, since it is very time-intensive to do the editorial tug-of-war with more than a small seminar-room full of students who at the start had pretty good drafts.Â
I suppose it depends on your classroom and on the students.Â
Another issue with this assignment besides time-intensiveness is that since the prof is literally rewriting the students’ work at places, the ability for a graded assignment to be meaningful depends on there being a small distance between both the skills and power differential between the prof and student. I think for grad students the gain is great relative to the risk, and for undergrads (certainly at my institution) much less so. In other words, I’d have to do far more heavy lifting for them, and would expect far less push-back from them, than for/from grad students and I think that would not only defeat the point of the exercise but also get into some ethical grey areas.
I should say, for “most” undergrads at my institution. I have been blessed to work with some gifted exceptions to this rule.Â
I would strongly agree that one should not do this kind of thing in an undergraduate classroom. Having students write punchy essays rather than traditional research papers and then grading those might make sense in some contexts, but as you say, the editorial back-and-forth would not be appropriate for undergraduate classes.
Mshirk, FP does absolutely edit heavily and does change the meaning of prose. You have to push back on the important stuff and sigh/move on for the unimportant stuff. Don’t know about FA, but I expect it does too.Â
I found Charli’s assignment VERY realistic and useful for people who want to publish in such outlets. However, my guess is that your students don’t necessarily write in the obtuse academic style that the rest of us do. Perhaps it is easier to teach PhD students to write in this style than it is to teach professors to do so. For example, I was not a quick study and neither was Sue Peterson. We resisted the suggestions from editors that we saw as dumbing down our prose and turning our subtle distinctions into unsupported assertions. But, after a few rounds we got over ourselves and just came to believe that this kind of editing came with the territory. Now we pick our battles more selectively and the whole process is much less costly than it was a few years ago.Â
Two responses: yes, grad students (at least mine) do write in an obtuse, academic style. Just like WE do; which of course is why we selected them for doctoral work: to some extent that is what we are looking for in the academy. In fact, one of the things I got out of this assignment was a lot more empathy for beltway editors, once I put myself in their shoes.Â
I’m not sure that being exposed to the differences in writing / editorial styles necessarily helps them expand their tool-kits (though one hopes). But I’m pretty sure it does something my doctoral education didn’t: impress upon them that the way we write is not “the” way, it is simply a way that is helpful in our trade, but is also based in large part on making ourselves unintelligible to others. Â And if we want to teach well and impact the world we have to find ways to either change that language or (my preference, since academic jargon actually has utility within the discipline) become fluent in multiple languages for expressing the same concepts. Perhaps not perfectly, perhaps not precisely, but well enough to be understood when it matters.
Of course, this approach presumes translatability. There are, I would say, concepts that cannot be correctly translated into the prosaic language-game of an op-ed without serious intellectual consequences. Part of being bilingual is recognizing when translation (necessarily) fails, too.
I think it is a mistake to do this as a graded assignment in a doctoral-level course. The attitude towards scholarship one has to adopt when doing this kind of writing — an attitude I might characterize as “brutally instrumental” or “completely and utterly lacking in nuance” — is quite contrary to the cultivation of a properly scholarly disposition, which I take to be the point of being a doctoral student to begin with. I would rather encourage students to engage in some properly academic blogging, which means essays rather than op-eds, and to do it outside of class as part of their general scholarly formation. But as a graded exercise I fear that it sends the wrong message, even if one works in class to identify the differences between the language-games. Knowledge is not produced in 750-word op-eds, period. That’s called “politics,” not “scholarship.”
PTJ, you make some good points   except (I think) the “mistake” part.Â
The students won’t take it seriously if it’s not graded. The message the exercise sends is “this is hard;” whether it’s “worthwhile” is an open and very reasonable question that the assignment helps provoke.  And importantly, the students are not being asked to “produce” knowledge in this assignment. They are being asked to first consume and then communicate it with as much nuance as possible given their audience and these particular gatekeepers, and given some sense of how tricky that can be and what it feels like. I found the exercise honed the “scholarly disposition” they then brought to the theory-policy divide readings (and other human security readings). Of course, we’ll see how it affected their preparedness to also write comp-style final essay exams when I grade those this week…
Consume-and-communicate is not, I think, what we should be training doctoral students to do. Give them opportunities outside of the classroom to develop those skills if they want to, okay, but make the ability to do something that runs directly contrary to the properly scholarly vocation of knowledge-production count for a part, even a small part, of a grade in a course? That, I think, is the mistake, because what it signals is that this skill-set is part of one’s necessary formation as a scholar. Which. It. Is. NOT. People have brilliant scholarly IR careers never writing for Foreign Affairs or FPOnline, never doing a governmental service fellowship, and never participating in discussions with policymakers or NGO activists about strategy and tactics. But they never have brilliant scholarly IR careers without publishing articles and books that use theory and data to make explanatory and/or critical arguments, so that’s what we ought to be training doctoral students to do most effectively. It is, as Weber might say, our damned duty.
You will note that I have, sadly, not mentioned teaching, because people do (unfortunately) have brilliant scholarly IR careers without knowing a damn thing about effective teaching. So by the same logic, I would be opposed to making graded exercises regarding teaching part of a doctoral education. Providing lots of opportunities and support for people to become effective and inspiring teachers, yes, but grading them on their prowess at it? I think that crosses a line.
I strongly disagree with you that knowledge production is “THE properly scholarly vocation.” Knowledge production is important and of course we teach that as well. I think a big part of responsible scholarship is about knowledge consumption, interpretation and communication. And of COURSE we grade students on the ability to do this. What is a comprehensive exam or a critical reading reaction, if not the expression of consumed knowledge, interpreted by a student socialized to communicate it in a specific way? The only difference here is that on this one assignment they are being trained to communicate to a non-academic audience – and implicitly, to think critically about how the academic enterprise is situated within the world we study.Â
Your argument also implies that  assignments like this would come at the expense of “properly scholarly” assignments. In my classes students actually do both. I think the bigger question is whether trying to do both simultaneously is helpful pedagogically or not. We’ll see.Â
A comp properly written is a display of a student’s ability to make an argument grounded in the literature, not the kind of “consumption and communication” appropriate to a popular/public forum like FPOnline. Which is why, I think, we don’t see many comps essays showing up there, and why people schooled in the writing of comps essays need an intensive editorial retooling in order to write for that forum. Otherwise the translation would be seamless and simultaneous, right?
I don’t think that there is any part of the properly scholarly vocation that involves being a consumer of knowledge, because that misrepresents the status of “knowledge” as something definite, fixed, easily consumable. Lay people might think it’s like that, but any of us who regularly hang out backstage know better: the elegant ornament in the crown is made of paper mâché, that apparently-solid building is a facade held together with spit and chewing gum and duct tape, etc. The attitude of knowledge-consumption downplays or ignores the fragile character of our knowledge, because there’s no time or space for nuance in that language-game or form of life. Which is why it’s not properly scholarly.
The same might be said of “communication,” since the way you are using it implies — to me, at least — that a bit of knowledge can be divorced from its circumstances of production and transmitted more or less intact. I disagree. There is no such thing as knowing X divorced from the methodological presuppositions that make it possible to know X in the first place, which is why there is no such thing as “knowledge” in the abstract (unless one means the complex and not always coherent sum total of stuff that we know under various forms of knowing).
As for interpretation, I would say that good scholarly interpretation requires taking a claim apart to see what makes it tick, and not just reporting the results of some study and spelling out its practical implications…which is a lot of what I see in op-eds.
Scholarship and politics are different worlds because they are characterized by different language-games underpinned by different forms of life. “Bridging the gap” is a misleading agenda, because in practice it means sacrificing one agenda to the other. I would reject a scholarly politics the same way I reject a political scholarship. Mixing chocolate and peanut butter makes great candy, but it makes poor social science.
I don’t seen any contradiction between my objectives and yours. Â As to whether scholarship and politics are completely divorced from one another, I neither see that as true (see the latest TRIP survey) or as ideal if it were. We’d have better policies if policy-makers had a better understanding of causal relations; scientists and experts have important roles to play here, social scientists no less. These are different worlds, but they need to be in dialogue.Â
Now we’re into territory where you and I just basically disagree completely ;-) I don’t think we would have better policies if policy-makers adopted scholarly understandings of causal relations, I don’t think that the TRIP survey has anything useful to say about this question because the issue is conceptual and philosophical so can’t be resolved by a survey, and I think that the only kind of dialogue one might have between these worlds is going to be irremediably marked by two very different purposes to which knowledge is put. So encouraging doctoral candidates to get involved in a non-scholarly world, even a little bit, strikes me as a very dangerous proposition. This is a much longer conversation, probably not best carried out in comments.
As I’ve said I have no objection to making such opportunities available. But I have strong objections to making it a required part of doctoral training or a required, for-a-grade part of a doctoral class.
Does it matter that a regrettably large percentage of PhD students will not go onto scholarly careers? Â As has been covered on this blog the last few weeks, there are too many PhD and too few professorships to go around. Â So it you a) aren’t from a top 10-15 school and b) your work sits outside the mainstream you may be pretty likely to end up with a career in policy or something related. Â
If this is the case then teaching students to work in policy or to communicate to policy audiences (putting aside the argument that scholars shouldn’t be too concerned with this) would be doing them a service no? Â If they can only speak to scholarly audiences but are unable to become a scholar, this seems to be a big problem. Â Now, I could understand if you are arguing that more time spent on ‘scholarly’ assignments means that they are more likely to end up as scholars but if this is the only focus of every department, clearly this isn’t happening.
I think that it is our responsibility to train doctoral students to be scholars, whether they exercise that capacity in the academy or outside of it. I do not think that it is our responsibility to train doctoral students to do things that are not scholarly, although we can certainly afford them opportunities to gain those skills.
If you’re not getting a PhD from a top 20 program and your work isn’t US mainstream, it’s fortunate that there’s a rest of the planet out there where people often do much more interesting scholarship. Sometimes they employ expatriates, and sometimes they provide the scholarly community that is sorely lacking when one is squeezed between op-eds and unreflective neopositivism. And there are also a lot of institutions in the US where one can be hired as a teacher, the traditional partner of the scholarly vocation…
I think it is our responsibility to train doctoral students to be responsible scholars. Of course you and I probably disagree on what that means. To me, that consists of the things you identify, but it also includes communicating our understanding of how the world actually works, as well as our visions of how it might ideally work, to those who have the power to make it work better.Â
Making the world a better place is not, I would say, the point of responsible scholarship. That’s what politics is for.
 I probably should have expected that answer, but I have a further question.
You state above that you don’t think that learning to teach should be a graded exercise. However, it appears that you wish that teaching were a part of the scholarly vocation to the extent that we should spend time on it as part of a graduate education.Â
Now, this differs from your view of policy. It appears that you do not think that policy (or politics) should be a part of the scholarly vocation at all. And therefore we should not teach how to communicate with policymakers and politicians as part of a graduate education.Â
So since there appear to be two different positions here (or at least the same position arrived at by two different routes), couldn’t it be argued that we SHOULD spend time teaching grad students how to be effective teachers because teaching SHOULD be a part of the scholarly vocation? Why accept standard practices here if one has a problem with them?
Now, it could be argued that we shouldn’t waste class time on teaching. It could also be argued that we shouldn’t have graded assignments on it in a class that is putatively about something else (one could take your criticism of Charli in this thread as you saying that we shouldn’t spend time teaching how to write op-eds in a class about human security). However, you seem to be in favor of outside-class support for teaching grad students how to teach. The problem here would be that this is more likely to come during the period of graduate study in which the dissertation, and not classwork, is the major focus. Would it not be more beneficial to learn how to teach through graded exercises in class as opposed to after one is done with classes and should be spending time on one’s dissertation since the dissertation is what is more like to a) get a student a job and b) fit into standard beliefs of what makes a scholar ‘brilliant’.Â
In other words, why shouldn’t we be teaching students how to teach, especially since some students are looking for/will be forced into teaching heavy jobs as you mention in your last post?
Good points. My position depends on an idealized separation between scholarship and teaching, even though in the normal course of events both are found together in the single profession of “academic.” I would not say that scholarship and teaching are necessarily linked, but by the same token, I would say that teaching can inform and enhance scholarship (and vice versa) in ways that policy/politics doesn’t, for the reasons I enumerated in on of my other replies in this thread someplace: neither scholarship not teaching, in my estimation, has much to do with the “consumer of knowledge” subject-position, whereas op-ed writing does.
Should teaching be part of the scholarly vocation? No. Is it part of the academic profession? I should certainly hope so. Should we teach students to teach as part of doctoral programs? If all doctoral students intended to become academics, yes; then the doctoral degree would be nothing but a professional socialization opportunity for academics. But not all doctoral students in IR intend to become academics — something that continues to baffle me, but whatever — so I think that this presents two choices: insist that all doctoral candidates be future academics (and enforce this at admission time), or retrench to that part of the academic profession that doesn’t involve teaching, which would be scholarship. In this model, development of doctoral candidates as teachers happens outside the classroom: supervised TAships, teams of people teaching different sections of the same course, eventually one’s own course.
In my ideal world no one would ever go get a PhD who didn’t intend to be an academic, PhD programs would be about helping people develop as both scholars and teachers, and this would be so obvious and self-evident that we wouldn’t be having a conversation about it ;-) Even in my ideal world I am not certain that graded exercises are the best way to develop good teachers, but that’s a practical question rather than a philosophical one.
Hi Charli,
I’ve read and recommended the blog a lot, but this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to comment. The exercise you describe sounds rewarding — and the debate in comments with PTJ is also interesting. This whole theory/ policy divide is fascinating. I’ve been on both sides of the fence — first as a research associate at CFR, helping coordinate and doing the majority of writing work on two task forces (uncredited, of course, as befitting my junior status); and then, after a move to Oslo, as a “real” researcher at a foreign policy research institute here, focusing more on academic output (peer-reviewed articles, a co-edited special issue, book chapters, etc) alongside “policy-relevant” commissioned work (usually from the Norwegian MFA) to pay the bills. (I work on UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding issues, previously was heavy on DDR, now more on gender). Currently I’m doing a PhD at Univ of Oslo under the auspices of a larger project funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Reading through your post and also your syllabus, I was struck by a couple of things. One, there really is a lot more hand-holding of PhD students in the US than elsewhere; although maybe it seems this way to me because I was in the workforce for 12 years before starting my PhD, and did my MPhil in the UK, which is more of a sink-or-swim environment, and am doing a PhD in an extremely unstructured, laissez-faire environment (course-wise, all I need are 30 study points, i.e. 3-4 courses, of my own choosing). Have most of your students gone straight through? Do they really need so much coddling? Second, I find the emphasis on short (3000-word pitch, 750 word op-ed) pieces to be interesting. I agree that those are useful forms to have experience in, especially for those doing applied research. But I think that — considering, as Mshirk noted, most PhD students in the US don’t end up in the academy — a more useful skill would be the art of the policy brief — 4-5 pages max, with a one-para executive summary and concise recommendations — or the policy report (longer, but with a similarly short exec summary and also with specific recommendations for different policy actors). Here the ICG model comes to mind. Based on my (admittedly limited) experience, this is the form that most think-tankers will be working in (either in addition to, or in lieu of, their more “traditional” academic work), much more so than the occasional op-ed. And (again, in my limited experience), these two forms — policy briefs/ reports and academic articles — require quite different skill sets. Just because a person excels at one does not mean they will shine at the other; and turning an academic article into a policy brief/ report (or vice versa) is not as easy as it looks. In fact, in my own experience, it’s virtually impossible (one has to jettison the notion that they are two related pieces; it’s not just a matter of trimming here or taking out some jargon there; the entire form, language, structure, and emphasis is different). Maybe this is another form to play around with in future classes?