Summary Notes of

Summary Notes of
Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article
By Howard S. Becker

Reference citation for this document is given below:
Malhotra, Yogesh (1996). Summary Notes of Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article [WWW document]. URL http://www.brint.com/papers/writing.htm.

Here is an outline of the key issues, mostly in Becker's own words, hoping it would motivate you to read the original. The main points have been highlighted in bold. The complete citation of the book is given below.

Becker, Howard S. Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

A thought provoking piece that reflects upon the essence and the philosophy of writing, and the fears, anxieties, joys and frustrations involved in the process, in a down to earth tone. A "must read" for any aspiring writer and highly recommended for more prolific writers. -- Yogesh Malhotra

Chapter 1. Freshman English for Graduate Students

You don't have to write like a social scientist to be one.

"I habitually wrote manuscripts eight to ten times before publication (although not before giving them to my friends to read)." Must give up the one-draft method of producing papers.

How can you find out what readers will understand? You can give your early drafts to sample members of your intended audience and ask them what they think.

Verbose, redundant, or meaningless expressions should be avoided. Similarly, passive constructions, abstract nouns, should be avoided. Sociologists' inability or unwillingness to make causal statements similarly leads to bad writing.

Writings need not be a one-shot, all-or-nothing venture. It could have stages, each with its own criteria for excellence. An insistence on clarity and polish appropriate to a late version is entirely inappropriate to earlier ones meant to get the ideas on paper. Worrying about rules of writing too early in the process could keep you from saying what you actually had to say. The only version that matters is the last one.

Scientific writings are a form of rhetoric, meant to persuade, and some forms of persuasion the scientific community considers okay and some illegitimate. You cannot write without using rhetoric and therefore you cannot evade questions of style.

You have already made many choices when you sit down to write, but probably don't know what they were. That leads, naturally, to some confusion, to a mixed-up early draft. But a mixed-up draft is no cause for shame. Rather, it shows you what your earlier choices were; what ideas, theoretical viewpoints, and conclusions you had already committed yourself to before you began writing. Knowing that you will write many more drafts, you know that you need not worry about this one's crudeness and lack of coherence. This one is for discovery, not for presentation.

The only job left -- even though you have just begun to write -- is to make it all clearer. The rough draft shows you what needs to be made clearer; the skills of rewriting and copy editing let you do it. Making your work clearer involves consideration of audience. Who is it supposed to be clearer to? Who will read what you write? What do they have to know so that they will not misread or find what you say obscure or unintelligible? The writing 'style' will depend upon the audience you are targeting.

If you start writing early in your research -- before you have all your data, for instance -- you can begin cleaning up your thinking sooner. Writing a draft without data makes clearer what you would like to discuss and, therefore, what data you will have to get.

Why different reviewers may give contradictory advice regarding the same issue? Both critics might be responding to the same confusion. Try to write so clearly that no one could misunderstand and make changes you didn't like. The author need not do what any of them (the critics) says, but should get rid of the confusion so that it will no longer be there to complain about.

Given the diversity of the "blind review," in the long run, authors seldom go unpublished simply because they have the wrong views or work in the wrong style. So many organizations publish so many journals that every point of view finds a home somewhere. But editors still reject papers or send them back with the instruction "revise and resubmit" because they are mixed-up -- because their authors write unclearly or misstate the problem they want to address.

More commonly, writers solve the problem of isolation by developing a circle of friends who will read their work in the right spirit, treating as preliminary what is preliminary, helping the author sort out the mixed-up ideas of a very rough draft or smooth out the ambiguous language of a later version, suggesting references that might be helpful or comparisons that will give the key to some intractable puzzle.

Some people cannot read things in an appropriate way. They fixate on small things -- sometimes just a word that could easily be replaced by one that avoids the problem -- and cannot think about or comment about anything else. Others, usually known far and wide as excellent editors, see the core problem and give helpful suggestions. Avoid the former. Search out the latter.

Chapter 2. Persona and Authority

In the process of rewriting drafts, try to cut down the words without loosing the meaning of the work (make it more rich). Make it less pretentious, remove meaningless qualifications, combine sentences that repeat long phrases, and when the same thing is said in two ways in successive sentences, take out the less effective version.

Desire for "elitist" status is one reason why academics slip so easily into unintelligibility.... To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

Authoritativeness is not inherent in any piece of writing. These devices ("classier") work on an audience unfamiliar with the area. But it might be necessary to use the same devices to convince experts that you know what you are talking about.

Every style, then, is the voice of someone the author wants to be, or be taken for.

If you want to convince yourself that the time and effort spent getting your degree are worth it, that you are changing in some way that will change your life, then you want to look different from everyone else, not the same. That accounts for a truly crazy cycle in which students repeat the worst stylistic excesses the journals contain, learn that those very excesses are what makes their work different from what every damn fool knows and says, write more articles like those they learned from, submit them to journals whose editors publish them because nothing better is available (and because academic journals cannot afford expensive copy editing) and thus provide the raw material for another generation to learn bad habits from.

Chapter 3. One Right Way

Scholarly writers have to organize their material, express an argument clearly enough that readers can follow the reasoning and accept the conclusions. They make this job harder than it need be when they think that there is only One Right Way to do it, that each paper they write has a preordained structure they must find. They simplify their work, on the other hand, when they recognize that there are many effective ways to say something and that their job is only to choose one and execute it so that readers will know what they are doing.

Write introductions last. "Introductions are supposed to introduce. How can you introduce something you haven't written yet? You don't know what it is. Get it written and then you can introduce it." There could be a variety of possible introductions available, each one right in some way, each giving a slightly different twist to your thought. Fearing commitment to the implications of an initial formulation also accounts for people beginning with the vacuous sentences and paragraphs so common in scholarly writing. "This study deals with the problem of careers" or "Race, class, professional culture, and institutional organization all affect the problem of public education." Those sentences employ a typical evasive maneuver, pointing to something without saying anything, or anything much, about it.

Put your last paragraph first, telling readers where the argument is going and what all this material will finally demonstrate. That introduction, laying out the map of the trip the author is going to take them on, lets readers connect any part of the argument with its overall structure. Readers with such a map seldom get confused or lost.

Evasive vacuous sentences, however, are actually good ways to begin early drafts. They give you some leeway at a time when you don't want or need to be committed, and most important, they let you start. Write one down and you can go ahead without worrying that you have put your foot on a wrong path, because you haven't really taken a step yet. You just have to remember, when you have written the rest of what you have to say, to go back and replace these placeholders with real sentences that say what you mean. Your last paragraph reveals to you what the introduction ought to contain, and you can go back and put it in and then make the minor changes in other paragraphs your new-found focus requires.

Write whatever comes into your head, as fast as you can type, without reference to outlines, notes, data, books or any other aids. The object is to find out what you would like to say, what all your earlier work on the topic or project has already led you to believe. Do 'freewriting." That's why it is so important to write a draft rather than to keep on preparing and thinking about what you will write when you do start. You need to give the thoughts a physical embodiment, to put them down on paper.

Once you have your work on paper, you do know what you want to say and, once you have the different versions before you, you can easily see how trivial the differences are. We are committed, not by the choice of a word, but by the analysis we have already done. That's why it makes no difference how we begin. We chose our path and destination long before.

For students who get hung up trying to frame a dissertation topic, I ask them to write down, in no more than one or two sentences, one hundred different thesis ideas. Few people get past twenty or twenty-five before they see that they only have two or three ideas, which are almost always variations on a common theme.

Writers find the question of which-way-to-organize-it a problem, again, because they imagine that one of the ways is Right. They don't let themselves see that each of the several ways they can think of has something to recommend it, that none are perfect.

Organizing your ideas: Put each idea on a file card (word-processor paragraph). Sort your stack of cards into piles. Put the ones that seem to go together in one pile. Make a card on top of each one, a card that summarizes what all the cards in the pile say, generalizing their particulars. Lay the piles out in some order. Different ways of arranging them may emphasize different parts of your analysis. Something like a flowchart method.

Chapter 4. Editing by Ear

How do we edit by ear? Looking at a blank sheet of paper, or one with writing on it, we use what "sounds good" or "looks good" to us. We use heuristics, some precise, some quite vague.

Students find it difficult at first to understand why, having rewritten a sentence, I then rewrite it again, and even a third or fourth time. Why don't I get it right the first time? I say, and try to show them, that each change opens the way to other changes, that when you clear away nonworking words and phrases, you can see more easily what the sentence is about and can phrase it more succinctly and accurately. Every word and punctuation mark should be questioned. However long it takes, such detailed editing is worth doing. Each change makes things marginally clearer and cuts out a few words that probably weren't doing much work anyway. The unnecessary words take up room and are thus uneconomic. They cheat, demanding attention by hinting at profundities and sophistication they don't contain. Seeming to mean something, those extra words mislead readers about what is being said.

Some useful tips for style.

(a) Active/passive: Substitute active verbs for passive ones when you can. Sentences that name active agents make our representations of social life more understandable and believable.

(b) Fewer words: Scholarly writers often insert words and whole phrases when they don't want to say something as flatly as it first came to them. Sometimes we put those throat-clearing phrases in because the rhythm or structure of the sentence seems to require it, or because we want to remind ourselves that something is missing in the argument. An unnecessary word does no work. It doesn't further an argument, state an important qualification, or add a compelling detail. I find unnecessary words by a simple test. As I read through my draft, I check each word and phrase to see what happens if I remove it.

(c) Repetition: Don't repeat the same word within so-and-so many sentences. You may have to repeat words, but you shouldn't repeat words when you can get the same result without doing it.

(d) Structure/content: The thoughts conveyed in a sentence usually have a logical structure, stating or implying some sort of connection between the things it discusses. We can make our point more forcefully by going from one to the next in a way that shows how they are connected other than by following one another in a list.

(e) Concrete/abstract: Scholars have favorite abstract words which act as placeholders. Meaning nothing in themselves, they mark a place that needs a real idea. We also use abstractions to indicate the general application of our thought. When we squeeze long, windy phrases into more compact phrases, we make diffuse ideas sharply specific. When we use concrete details to give body to abstractions, however, we should choose the details and examples carefully.

(f) Metaphors: I usually cut such metaphors out of anything I am editing. All metaphors? No, only ones like the "tired metaphors" discussed above [which aren't serious about their ramifications]. The difference between the two kinds of metaphor lies in the seriousness and attention with which they are used. I don't mean how seriously authors take their subject, but how seriously they take the details of their metaphor. A metaphor that works is still alive. Reading it shows you a new aspect of what you are reading about, how that aspect appears in something superficially quite different. Using a metaphor is a serious theoretical exercise in which you assert that two different empirical phenomena belong to the same general class, and general classes always imply a theory. But metaphors work that way only if they are fresh enough to attract attention. If they have been used repeatedly enough to be clichés, you don't see anything new.

Writers need to pay close attention to what they have written as they revise, looking at every word as if they meant it to be taken seriously. You can write first drafts quickly and carelessly exactly because you know you will be critical later. When you pay close attention the problems start taking care of themselves.

Chapter 5. Learning to Write as a Professional

The main point is that no one learns to write all at once, that learning, on the contrary, goes on for a professional lifetime and comes from a variety of experiences academia makes available.

Rewriting - was fun, a kind of word puzzle whose point was to find a really good economical way to say something clearly, and not an embarrassing task whose necessity revealed my shortcomings. Maybe thinking of writing as an enjoyable game immunized me against the anxieties other people describe, but my relative lack of writing anxiety also had sociological roots.

Journal editorial jobs are usually one of the honors that come to people who have been in the business for a while.

A journal is supposed to come out regularly, every second month or quarterly. If you missed your deadline, you lost your turn in the printer's queue, people complained about their magazine being late, and the officers of the sponsoring organization wanted to know what was wrong. Better to come out on time. That did not mean that you published work you didn't think was good, but that you published work that was good, no matter what its breed: quantitative or qualitative. Every journal editor I have ever talked to has agreed that, whatever prejudices they secretly expected to implement on assuming office, they soon found the main thing was to get enough decent articles to fill the journal and get it out on time. Authors who think editorial prejudice accounts for their work being turned down or sent back to "revise and resubmit" are, for that reason, almost always wrong. When sociologists show me work they think has been turned down because of prejudice, it is almost always badly organized and badly written. The prejudices that do exist operate more subtly, as when the editor decides that one badly written, poorly organized piece is worth putting some special effort into, but not another. The lesson for people who do unpopular work is not that they can't get published but that they shouldn't expect editors to do their work for them. No one should, but some have a better chance of happening.

I learned the importance of subject matter and having something to say about it.

When I could, I wrote a new version of the parts that didn't work. If I couldn't, I didn't. In either case, I usually put the paper away again, for months or sometimes years. Some papers never get finished, but I hate to waste anything I write and never give up hope, not even on pieces no one likes.

When I get criticisms and comments, from friends or from editors who have rejected a paper, I assume that I have failed to make my points clearly enough to forestall the objections they make, and look for what I can do to meet the objections without changing my position, unless the criticism convinces me that the position requires changing.

I was always working on several generations of writing simultaneously: roughing out an initial draft of something new, rewriting initial drafts from an older project, making the final revisions in something ready for press. That is easier than it sounds. In fact, it makes every step of the process easier because when you get stuck on one job you can turn to another, always doing what comes easiest.

I became more willing than ever to write down any damn thing that came into my head, knowing by analogy with photographing that I could always weed out what I didn't like or couldn't use.

Since I followed that advice, a reader can get the gist of the book just by looking at the pictures and reading the captions. All this has increased my interest in the visual aspects of writing and bookmaking. I expect my new computer's ability to produce pictures and unusual typefaces to be a help with that.

Chapter 6. Risk

The whole chapter [which is about the perceived risks of writing (and being judged) of a young academic] needs to be read. Good view of one academic's insight into the risks of writing and not writing, of being judged by peers and by self.

Chapter 7. Getting It out the Door

I can draw the analogy to the completion of consulting project assignments. Starting from the scratch [or an interim stage], the consultant has to deliver a final product [as per the specifications] on or before an agreed deadline. Each consulting project is a 'new' assignment, which requires the common skill-base, yet entails understanding of the specific needs and idiosyncrasies of each different site [or client].

The tension between making it better and getting it done appears wherever people have work to finish or a product to get out: a computer, a dinner, a term paper, an automobile, a book. But no object ever fully embodies its maker's conception of what it could have been.

I like to get it out the door. Although I like to rewrite and tinker with organization and wording, I soon either put work aside as not ready to be written or get it into a form fit to go out the door. My temperament -- impatient, eager for frequent rewards, curious how others will respond to what I have said -- pushes me in that direction. Intellectual life is a dialogue among people interested in the same topic. You can eavesdrop on the conversation and learn from it, but eventually you ought to add something yourself. Your research project isn't done until you have written it up and launched it into the conversation by publishing it.

More generally, you can decide when to let your work out the door by deciding what part you want to play in the world in which work like yours is done.

Most of these activities require that someone get some writing done, some product out the door. The organization of scholarly disciplines does not require any particular person to do these jobs. If I don't write a definitive book on the subject, you will; if not you, someone else. If neither of us writes the book, we may suffer; but the field will not. We will not be promoted, but someone will eventually write it, if the material to write it from exists, and they will get promoted while we continue to teach the introductory course. Nevertheless, those activities open the doors through which our scholarly writing can be moved out. Professionals orient themselves to the deadlines and constraints the disciplines create.

The scholarly world -- this is the other side of the ambivalence -- is also oriented toward the long run. In that mode, it does not need more of the same. It needs new ideas. But the old formats make it hard for a different idea to get a breath.

The individuals may suffer by virtue of which of the world's jobs they take on. If you take twenty years to write a book which then turns out not to be a major intellectual event, you will certainly suffer.

People assume, for instance, that taking more time is necessarily better than taking less time. After all, shouldn't thinking about a topic for a year produce better ideas and deeper understanding? Won't the extra time allow you to polish your prose so that it more accurately and elegantly expresses your improved thoughts? Of course these benefits will follow! The more time you invest, the greater your return.

But equating time spent and quality [of final product] may in fact be empirically false. More work may not produce a better product.

On the contrary, the more we think about it, the more we may introduce irrelevant considerations and inappropriate qualifications, insist on making connections that needn't be made -- until we bury the thoughts in Byzantine ornamentation. "More is better" is no more true than "less is better." Yes, writing needs reworking and thought. But how much? The answer should be sought pragmatically, not in fixed attitudes.

Scholars know that the subjects they write about involve so much that ought to be considered, so many connections between so many elements, so much of everything that it seems inconceivable that it can be given a rational order. But that's our business: to arrange ideas in so rational an order that another person can make sense of them. We have to deal with that problem on two levels. We have to arrange the ideas in a theory or narrative, describe the causes and conditions that lead to the effects we want to explain, and do it in an order that is logically and empirically correct.

Chapter 8. Terrorized by the Literature

A good way to prove your originality is to attach your idea to a tradition in which people have already explored the literature. Hitching your work to a well-explored scholarly star helps you to assure yourself that your work doesn't redo something already done. Writers should, of course, use relevant literature appropriately.

Science and humanistic scholarship are, in fact as well as in theory, cumulative enterprises. None of us invent it all from scratch when we sit down to write. We depend on our predecessors. We couldn't do our work if we didn't use their methods, results, and ideas. Few people would be interested in our results if we didn't indicate some relationship between them and what others have said and done before us.

Individual scientists don't make scientific revolutions. Those revolutions take a long time. Large number of people, working together, develop a new way of formulating and investigating the problems they are interested in, a way which finds a home in lasting institutions of scientific work. If making a scientific or scholarly revolution singlehandedly is our chief goal, we are bound to fail. Better to pursue the goals of normal science: to do a piece of good work others can use, and thus increase knowledge and understanding. Since we can attain those things in our own research and writing, we don't set ourselves up for failure by aiming at the impossible.

Are there effective ways to use the literature? Of course. For one thing, scholars must say something new while connecting what they say to what's already been said, and this must be done in such a way that people will understand the point. They must say something at least minimally new. Although the empirical sciences pay lip service to the idea of replicating results, they don't pay off for it. At the same time, as you approach total originality, you interest fewer and fewer people. Everyone is interested in the topics people have studied and written about for years, both because the topics are of great and continuing general concern and because they have been studied for so long.

The ideal scholarly contribution makes readers say:"That's interesting!" You must learn to connect your work to literature in just that way, to set your results in the context of accepted theories that make it unlikely.

If you are making a wood table, you needn't make all the parts yourself. You can take standard sizes and shapes, and standard components, and fit them into places you left for them, knowing that they were available. Similarly while making an argument, you needn't invent the whole thing. Other people have worked on your problem or problems related to it and have made some of the pieces you need. You just have to fit them where they belong. Like the woodworker, you leave space, when you make your portion of the argument, for the other parts you know you can get. You do that, that is, if you know that they are there to use. And that's one good reason to know the literature: so that you will know what pieces are available and not waste time doing what has already been done.

Is working that way plagiarizing or being unoriginal? I don't think so, although fear of such labels pushes people to desperate attempts to think of new concepts. If I need the idea for the table I'm building, I'll take it. It's still my table, even though some parts were prefabricated. In fact, I am so accustomed to working this way that I am always collecting such prefabricated parts for use in future arguments. I also collect modules I have no present use for, when my intuition tells me I will eventually find the use. I may not use these ideas in their original form. I may transform them in ways their parents wouldn't recognize or approve of, and interpret them in ways students of these thinkers will find incorrect. I will probably use them in contexts quite different from those in which they were first proposed, and fail to give due weight to theoretical exegeses which strive to discover the core meanings their inventors intended. My work may look like a patchwork quilt as a result.

What you want to say has a certain logic that flows from the chain of choices you made as you did the work. If the logic of your argument is the same as the logic of the dominant approach to the topic, you have no problem. But suppose it isn't. What you want to say starts from different premises, addresses different questions, recognizes a different kind of answer as appropriate. When you try to confront the dominant approach to this material, you start to translate your argument into its terms. Your argument will not make the kind of sense it made in its own terms; it will sound weak and disjointed and will appear ad hoc. It cannot look its best playing on opponent's game. And that phrasing puts the point badly, because what's involved is not a contest between approaches, after all, but a search for a good way to understand the world. The understanding you're trying to convey will lose its coherence if it is put in terms that grow out of a different understanding.

The literature has the advantage of what is sometimes called ideological hegemony over you. If its authors own the territory, their approach to it seems as natural and reasonable as your new and different approach seems strange and unreasonable. Their ideology controls how readers think about the topic. As a result, you have to explain why you haven't asked those questions and gotten those answers. Proponents of the dominant argument don't have to explain their failure to look at things your way.

The two approaches to investigating the same question [or problem] may not be totally divergent. They can be made to coincide (integrative approach). But in the eagerness to show that existing literature is wrong do not loose track of what your research was really about.

Chapter 9. Friction and Word Processors

The most important benefit of writing on a computer: how much easier it would be to think by writing. I habitually write an almost deliberately disorganized first draft -- whatever comes into my head -- hoping to discover the main themes I want to work on by seeing what comes out in that uncensored flow. I continue to write the second draft which puts those themes together in some more-or-less logical order. In the third draft, I cut words, combine sentences, rephrase ideas, and in the course of that get an even clearer idea of what I mean to say.

For me, it's meant learning to think modularly, learning to deal more than I ever did with small units of material I can put together and take apart in several ways to see how the result looks. Similarly, I edit extensively on the screen, skipping the stage of printing out a version and working on the paper copy that many people hang on to. That allows me to look at five different ways of saying the same thing before I decide on one. I may even line them up one under the other to compare them.

Sociological writers keep data around in various forms: notes on reading, field notes, summaries of results, ideas about how to organize materials, bibliographies, memos on this and that. Every scholar needs a system for organizing all this paper, and computer programs called "file managers" or "data bases" do something like that. (Becker, Gordon, and LeBilly 1984 discuss the criteria for computer systems to handle field notes and similar materials.)

Next 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6

Back

http://www.brint.com/papers/writing.htm

Academic year 2008/2009

garmoma2@alumni.uv.es
Página creada: 1/11/08