Most students and even faculty in psychology receive little or no formal training in how to write psychology papers. Nor do they necessarily learn how to write grant and contract proposals, book proposals, or talks and lectures. Many people believe that writers receive sufficient training in writing through informal channels and thus will acquire the necessary skills on their own. Do students learn the writing techniques for psychology on their own? Our experience reading psychology papers suggests that often they do not. Moreover, this experience is shared by other psychology professors and by professors in other disciplines, as well.

The purpose of this book is to provide the basic information that students and professionals alike need to write and write well in psychology. This information is contained in 17 chapters. Although the intent is that you read the chapters in the order in which they are presented, they are for the most part self-contained and hence can be read in almost any sequence.

Chapter 1 presents and discusses eight common misconceptions that students hold about psychology papers. We have found that many of these misconceptions are reinforced rather than extinguished by conventional academic training. Most students come to believe, for example, that journal articles are and should be autobiographical – that the logical development of ideas in a psychology paper reflects their historical development in the psychologist's head.