Adapted from the Harvard College Writing Center's brief guide
What makes psychology writing its own animal — and how to feed it.
Psychology writing exists to convey factual knowledge supported by research — and it asks to be read literally. Every word you write will be taken at face value, so precision beats flourish every time. Where a humanities writer repeats a phrase for emphasis, a psychologist repeats a term only for clarity. Where an essayist quotes, a psychologist distills: the essence of the idea, in your own words, with the citation. The best writers in the field make complex ideas understandable to people outside their specialty — density is a side effect, never the goal.
The Harvard guide describes the two genres psychology students meet: the empirical paper (a study with actual or predicted data) and the literature review (a synthesis of other people's research). In PSY 460 you write one paper — a full research proposal — and it contains both: your literature review IS the introduction, and the method, expected results, and discussion that follow make it an empirical paper (with predicted data). One manuscript, both skills.
The whole thing follows Bem's hourglass: open broad, narrow to your specific point, then widen back out to the big picture. And it needs two ingredients: a topic AND a point. Even in the literature-review portion, it is not enough to reiterate what you've read — you must add something of your own: an insight, a reinterpretation, a theory that explains why two literatures disagree. The context you build in your introduction should let the reader see both why the question matters and what you are contributing to it.
A literature review synthesizes research on a topic while shedding new light on it — and remember, yours is the introduction of your proposal, not a separate paper. Go to original, empirical, peer-reviewed sources — never build a review on other people's summaries. Then let three questions structure it:
| Section | Its one job |
|---|---|
| Abstract | The whole paper in ~150 words, one or two sentences per section — comprehensible even if nobody reads further. |
| Introduction | What question you're tackling, why it matters, what's known, and your hypothesis — plus the alternative answers your study can rule out. A study whose results fit every hypothesis is of no interest. |
| Method | Participants, materials, procedure — detailed enough that a stranger could replicate your study without ever emailing you. |
| Results / Predicted Results | The evidence psychologists like best: data. Data cleaning, the analyses, and the findings — descriptives (usually a graph) alongside the inferential statistics, hypothesis-relevant results first. In a proposal, this is your analysis plan and predictions. |
| Discussion | Synthesize and conclude: What do the results mean? Do they support the hypothesis and rule out the alternatives? How do they speak to the literature from your introduction — and to the real world? |
| References | New page, APA format, everything cited and nothing else. |
In psychology, conclusions rest on data — not on anyone's opinion, however distinguished. An opinion may open a discussion or pose a question, but it can never close one.
| Not evidence | Evidence |
|---|---|
| "Smith argues that 'attitudes toward gay rights have liberalized over the last two decades.'" | "In a 30-year longitudinal survey, Smith (1999) found that attitudes toward gay rights became more liberal." |
| "Morality is innate (Smith, 2004)." — when Smith only argued it | "Smith (2004) argues that morality is innate, which raises a question for further research." |
| "Hurricane Katrina was a disaster." | "Hurricane Katrina resulted in thousands of deaths, which researchers have attributed to the ineffective government response (Anderson, 2007; Williams, 2006)." |
The pattern: specific, sourced, empirical. Even a statement you and your professor both believe cannot stand as fact without data behind it.
Most of your citations should be primary empirical reports from peer-reviewed journals. Citing a chapter's summary of a study asks your reader to gamble that the summarizer got it right — overuse of secondary sources is sloppy scholarship. If your reference list is mostly books and chapters, go find the original studies they cite (their reference lists are your map). In PsycINFO and Google Scholar, the "cited by" count tells you how central an article is to the field — keeping in mind that recent papers haven't had time to collect citations yet.
These should sound familiar — they're the same rules the Absolute Dos and Absolute Nos drill into muscle memory.
American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000
Bem, D. J. (2004). Writing the empirical journal article. In J. M. Darley, M. P. Zanna, & H. L. Roediger III (Eds.), The compleat academic: A career guide (2nd ed., pp. 185–219). American Psychological Association.
Olson, K. R., & Meyersburg, C. A. (2008). A brief guide to writing the psychology paper. Harvard College Writing Center, Harvard University.