Penn Professors on Writing in Accounting

Dr. Brian Bushee

About the Professor

Dr. Brian Bushee is the Gilbert and Shelly Harrison Associate Professor of Accounting and does research focusing on the impact of information intermediaries on corporate disclosure decisions and on the stock market pricing of information. For more information and links to of Professor Bushee's writing, please visit his Wharton Faculty Page

Important Criteria for Student Writing

Dr. Bushee believes that the most vital aspect of writing is the logical flow of the arguments in the narrative. However, Dr. Bushee also believes that things like grammar and typos do give off an air of sloppiness. If a writer has incorrect grammar, it gives off the impression that perhaps he also was not careful in doing the data analysis and writing his models. Even though Prof. Bushee maintains that the the organization of the argument is most important, he believes that if you are sloppy in writing it gives off the impression that perhaps you were not not careful in your paper's other aspects.

Dr. Bushee believes that the biggest error in writing is an argument that is not linear: where the writer brings in ideas that the reader cannot understand until he has been exposed to some other idea. For students who have trouble with this, Dr. Bushee would suggest making outline or diagram to try to make their arguments more linear and easier to follow.

Personal Writing Process

One of the things that Prof. Bushee does not do often, but used to, is outline before writing. He believes that part of that is because the journal articles he writes tend to follow a standard natural outline; because there is a typical format that papers take, he generally knows what he needs to write and where.

Dr. Bushee typically writes the hypothesis section first, then about the sample, and then the result. After all that is complete, he then goes back and writes the introduction. According to Dr. Bushee, there have been times where he has spent the entire day working on the first paragraph because he believes that what you write in the first paragraph is going to completely set in peoples' minds what you are doing. If you mess that up at all, people will start thinking about your paper in the wrong way and will not be able to adjust. Once you know that everything is in the paper, Prof. Bushee believes, it becomes a matter of how to best capture that idea in the first paragraph to get the reader aboard with what you are talking about.

How to Be an Effective Writer in Accounting

According to Dr. Bushee, good writers in accounting are those who have creative ideas people who find new ways of measuring something and/or design unique experiment designs. In accounting, he maintains, such creativity is values this more than the way in which something is written up. Regardless of how well-written a paper is, if its fundamental ideas are not that great the paper is not valuable. However, Prof. Bushee believes, conversely, writing really can matter: if you have a great idea but cannot communicate it, those papers often get rejected because people just don't know what you're talking about.

What Prof. Bushee Writes

Primarily, Prof. Bushee writes journal articles on new research. Occasionally he writes discussion pieces on others' research papers. Beyond that, Dr. Bushee has written a few translations of his findings for practitioners.