As a graduate student, your duty is to begin to engage in an academic conversation within your field to boost your credibility and recognition as a young scholar. This is achieved by writing and publishing. However, breaking into the publishing realm is both difficult and intimidating, particularly for those in terminal masters degree programs with only two years to accomplish a multitude of tasks. A very suitable entry point into this realm is through policy briefs. Policy briefs provide the opportunity to both expand upon the policies that fuel many debates in a particular field and gain practice synthesizing ideas succinctly. This guide will provide you with some best practices for choosing a topic, designing a template, and writing a brief, in addition to some general practices that will help you write effectively.