David Bell
The Professor as a Writer
About the Professor
Professor Bell is the Xinmei Zhang and Yongge Dai Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School. He specializes in e-commerce and consumer behavior and is on the editorial boards of International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Retailing, and Marketing Science. Dr. Bell writes across a variety of genres, including academic papers, books and broader interest writing targeted towards a business audience.
PERSONAL WRITING PROCESS
Dr. Bell’s writing process begins with idea generation, whereby the writer collects some data to see what’s going on and determines whether there is some puzzle to be explained or theory to be tested. His writing process is fairly iterative, and focuses on the two or three key points that he is trying to make. In terms of inspiration, Dr. Bell finds ideas from looking at data, reading the newspaper, popular books or other academic articles. Dr. Bell stresses the importance of thinking about what you can add to the knowledge base. Academic writing is based on explaining something that is not too intuitive or obvious.
Important Criteria for Student Writing
When evaluating student assignments, Professor Bell ranks the different elements of a written piece of work in the following order of importance:
- Having original ideas: considering what is known in the discipline and adding to that knowledge base
- Reasoning and evidence
- Organization
- Demonstrating mastery of others’ ideas
- Style
- Grammar and Mechanics
- Following the assignment instructions
- Following the discipline’s citation practices
- Proper formatting
RECOMMENDATIONS
Dr. Bell recommends How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silvia to student writers as a good writing guide. He points to MIT Institute Professor John Little as an example of a strong writer in marketing.
MORE INFORMATION AND WRITING EXAMPLES
David Bell's Page© 2013 The University of Pennsylvania
