I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."Spelling out your theoretical and methodological assumptions -- the contours of your conceptual equipment, so to speak -- is a vital part of doing good social science, because if I don't know what your assumptions are then I really can't fairly evaluate your results. In fact, if I don't know what your assumptions are, I probably have little choice but to apply my own standards, which may or may not be appropriate to your...

I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."The fact that no one else has approached topic X with your particular perspective is not a sufficient warrant for approaching topic X with your particular combination of theory and methodology. In order to get the reader on board, you have to basically issue a promissory note with a grammar that runs something like:'Here's something odd/striking/weird/counterintuitive about X. Other scholars who have talked about X...