Most students and even faculty in psychology receive little or no formal training in how to communicate in psychology. Nor do they necessarily learn how to write grant and contract proposals, book proposals, or talks and lectures. Many people believe that writers receive sufficient training in writing through informal channels and thus will acquire the necessary skills on their own. Do students learn the writing techniques for psychology on their own? Our experience reading psychology papers suggests that often they do not. Moreover, this experience is shared by other psychology professors and by professors in other disciplines, as well. Psychologists also need excellent speaking skills.

The purpose of this book is to provide the basic information that students and professionals alike need to speak and write well in psychology. This information is contained in 20 chapters. Although the intent is that you read the chapters in the order in which they are presented, they are for the most part self-contained and hence can be read in almost any sequence.

Chapter 1 presents and discusses eight common misconceptions that students hold about psychology papers. We have found that many of these misconceptions are reinforced rather than extinguished by conventional academic training. Most students come to believe, for example, that journal articles are and should be autobiographical – that the logical development of ideas in a psychology paper reflects their historical development in the psychologist's head. Accepting this notion as a presupposition, students often believe that authors of journal articles can plan their research and predict their findings well in advance, often down to the last detail. Readers will know better after finishing Chapter 1.

One can write good papers only when one has good ideas that constitute the basis for the papers. Chapter 2 suggests alternative ways to generate ideas for papers. Because not all ideas are good ideas, the latter part of the chapter provides guidelines to decide which ideas are good ones that should be pursued. Finally, the chapter also gives tips on how to sell one's ideas to others.

Chapter 3 describes ways to conduct literature research in the best manner possible. We describe diverse reference materials, introduce literature research methods and useful databases, and explain how to use the Internet for scientific research and to evaluate the information found online.