Penn Professors on Writing in Political Science

Dr. Nancy Hirschmann

About the Professor

Dr. Nancy Hirschmann is a professor in Penn's Political Science Department and Director of the Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She specializes in modern and contemporary political theory, intersections between theory and public policy, the history of political thought, feminist theory, and disability theory. At Penn, Dr. Hirschmann has taught a wide range of courses including: Modern Political Thought; Political Theory and Public Policy; Feminist Political Thought; and American Political Thought. She is a former Vice President of the American Political Science Association and serves on a number of editorial boards including Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy and the Journal of Politics.

Personal Writing Process

Dr. Hirschmann characterizes her writing process as "draft after draft after draft" because "arguments have to be refined over and over again." She believes that "the key to good political theory is multiple drafts." When writing she thinks "every good argument has to have a cohesive body." She believes that the structure in the paper can help persuade the reader because it allows the reader "to put the different pieces of the argument together." She also notes that the structure "is not always the same in the sense that your structure will be influenced by what you are trying to argue, the kind of point you are trying to make."

Important Criteria for Student Writting

Dr. Hirschmann believes that an argument's clarity is the most important feature of all good writing. In her own writing, originality is required "because the point of scholarship is to add something to what we already know." This takes "a lot of creative thought, but that is based on a solid grounding of knowledge about what other people have already written." Hirschmann observes that student writers often get caught up in the need to be original at the expense of accurately interpreting the texts they are writing about. She advises student of political theory need to familiarize themselves "with what the classic writers [of political theory] have to say. It can take years to master those arguments," and that mastery serves as a tool for creative thinking.

Links

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Other professors in Political Science: Dr. Marc Meredith, Dr. John DiIulio, Dr. Anne Norton