I got a lot out of reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and D. McCloskey’s Rhetoric
of Economics. I also found Glenn Ellison’s “The slowdown of the economics publishing
process” in the JPE useful for thinking about how papers should be structured (and refereed
and edited, but that’s another story)

from: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/papers/phd_paper_writing.pdf