Writing and presenting

Throughout, aim for simple and precise language in active voice.

Academic writing

I recommend the following books and resources on academic writing.

For those targeting psychology journals, the APA Reporting Standards (JARS).
For those targeting economics, policy, and political science journals, these “writing formulas” for academic papers are great. Related: You can find my Overleaf template for applied micro papers here.
Marc Bellemare wrote the “middle bits” formula above; his Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School―But Didn’t (MIT Press, 2022), https://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/research/doing-economics expands on that (and it’s great!).
Use Grammarly and the Hemingway App
Re-read William Strunk Jr. and Elwyn Brooks White’s The Elements of Style (Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style.

Here are my two cents on academic presentations.

Use action titles. Avoid meaningless section headers such as “Outline”, “Data”, or “Results”.
Your slide deck is not a “hand-out” or a “reader”. If your audience can just read your slide deck, why should you present?
I’m still making the jump to Xaringan and Quarto (will I ever, fully?). While I’m still stuck with LaTeX, you can find one of my favorite presentation templates here. Here is a sample Overleaf project from when I used this theme for a presentation at UNU-WIDER.
In the past, I’ve also used Matt Blackwell’s adaptation of the Cousteau Beamer theme.
Please ensure your figures and slides are accessible. If you’re using R, go here first; then, consider going with one of the viridis color schemes. If you’re using Stata, the plotplainblind scheme from blindschemes is a good start.
Jesse Shapiro and Rachael Meager have nice presentations on how to give applied micro talks (listed here).