I was in 1993 asked to give a talk on how to write papers by people from Oslo University. They suggested that I brought along a paper myself, and I misunderstood and thought they asked me to write something on how to write papers and not just to bring one of my other papers along. I asked all my colleagues at Risoe National Laboratory and everyone else I knew what advice they had. The first version was written on a Saturday in Roskilde, Denmark, under the influence of a heavy influenza and high fever (perhaps I should do that more often ;-). It is the one paper people ask for and whenever I change the link, I get angry emails from lecturers needing to link to it. As a matter of principle (and due to a couple of failed attempts) I have decided that it will not appear in a journal. If you have any additions, comments or references, please drop me a line!

Click on the button to the right for a slightly updated version with new references and a list of on-line resources of a LSE-IS working paper (Sørensen, 2002), which in turn was an update of the conference version (Sørensen, 1994).