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Writing for Social Scientists

How to Start & Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article

Howard S. Becker

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21 quotes

language-arts

Chapter i becker 9

  • Writers routinely use meaningless expressions to cover up two kinds of problems. Both kinds of problems reflect serious dilemmas of sociological theory. One problem has to do with what is usually called “agency”: who did it? Who did the things your sentence alleges were done? Sociologists often prefer locutions that leave the answer to that question unclear, largely because many of their theories don’t tell them who is doing what. In many sociological theories, things just happen without anyone doing them. It’s hard to find a subject for a sentence when “larger social forces” or “inexorable social processes” are at work. Avoiding saying who did it produces two characteristic faults of sociological writing: the habitual use of passive constructions and abstract nouns.Jun 27 2024 8:51PM
  • If you say, for example, that “deviants were labeled,” you don’t have to say who labeled them. That is a theoretical error, not just bad writing. A major point of the labeling theory of deviance (outlined in Becker 2018) is precisely that someone labels the person deviant, someone with the power to do it and good reasons for wanting to. If you leave those actors out, you misstate the theory, both in letter and spirit.Jun 27 2024 8:52PM
  • We write that way because we fear that others will catch us in obvious errors if we do anything else, and laugh at us. Better to say something innocuous but safe than something bold you might not be able to defend against criticism. Mind you, it wouldn’t be objectionable to say, “A varies with B,” if that’s what you really want to say, and it is certainly reasonable to say, “I think A causes B and my data support that by showing that they covary.” But many people use such expressions to hint at stronger assertions they just don’t want to take the rap for. They want to discover causes, because causes are scientifically interesting, but don’t want the philosophical responsibility.Jun 27 2024 10:54PM
  • The nonspecific, ritual qualifier gave them an all-purpose loophole. If attacked, they could say they never said it was always true. Bullshit qualifications, making your statements fuzzy, ignore the philosophical and methodological tradition which holds that making generalizations in a strong universal form identifies the kind of negativeJun 27 2024 10:56PM
  • We discussed rhetoric, reading Gusfield (1981) on the rhetoric of social science, and Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1954). Surprisingly, to me, Gusfield the sociologist had a stronger impact than Orwell the writer.Jun 27 2024 11:28PM
  • Every time we answer a question about our work and what we have been finding or thinking, our choice of words affects the way we describe it the next time, perhaps when we are writing notes or making outlines.Jun 27 2024 11:31PM
  • “Getting it right” means putting the argument so clearly that the paper begins by asserting what it later demonstratesJun 27 2024 11:34PM

Chapter i becker 10

  • Instead of choosing to write “he lives at,” I prefer “he resides at.” Instead of saying “Couples spend their extra money” (or “additional money” or even “disposable income”) I’d choose “surplus income.” It sounds more grown-up. Here’s a favorite of mine: “predicated upon the availability of” is classier than saying “exists because of” [or, for that matter, “depends on”]. Maybe it sounds more awesome. Here’s another one. I could say “domestic help” but what I choose to do is say “third party labor.” The first time I use it I put a “that is” after the phrase and explain it. Then I am at liberty to use “third party labor” throughout, and it sounds fancier. I think the point here is that I am looking for a writing style that makes me sound smart.Jun 27 2024 11:41PM
  • The list of available personae varies among academic disciplines, because one source of personae is famous teachers or characters in a field. Admiring their teachers, students imitate not only their personal mannerisms, but also the way they write, especially when that style projects a distinctive personality. Thus, many philosophers adopted the diffident, tentative, arrogant persona and the worrying, conversational prose style of Ludwig Wittgenstein, just as many sociologists who take up ethnomethodology decorate their papers with the endless lists and qualifications of its founder, Harold Garfinkel.Jun 27 2024 11:49PM
  • Most sociological theories rely, for instance, on the idea that people remake society continuously by doing, day in and day out, the things that reaffirm that that is the way things are done. You might say that people create society by acting as though it existed. You might say, if you were a Marxist theorist, that people reproduce social relations through daily practice. If you were a symbolic interactionist, or an adherent of Berger and Luckmann, you might speak of the social construction of reality.Jun 27 2024 11:50PM
  • Artistic innovators frequently try to avoid what they regard as the excessive formalism, sterility, and hermeticism of their medium by exploiting the actions and objects of everyday life. Choreographers like Paul Taylor and Brenda Way use running, jumping, and falling down as conventionalized dance movements, instead of the more formal movements of classical ballet, or even of traditional modern dance. . . . [But] less involved audiences look precisely for the conventional formal elements the innovators replace to distinguish art from nonart. They do not go to the ballet to see people run, jump, and fall down; they can see that anywhere. They go instead to see people do the difficult and esoteric formal movements that signify “real dancing.” The ability to see ordinary material as art material—to see that the running, jumping, and falling down are not just that, but are the elements of a different language of the medium—thus distinguishes serious audience members from the well-socialized member of the culture, the irony being that these materials are perfectly well known to the latter, although not as art materials (Becker 1982a, 49–50).Jun 27 2024 11:53PM

Chapter i becker 11

  • The separation of scholarly work from teaching in almost all colleges and universities hides the process from students. (Just as, according to Thomas Kuhn, histories of science hide all the false turns and mistakes in the research programs that produced the successes they celebrate.) Students don’t know, never having seen their teachers (let alone textbook authors) at work, that all these people do things more than once, rather than treating their professional work as a quasi-test. Students don’t know that journal editors routinely send papers back for revision, that publishers hire editors to improve the prose of books to be published. They don’t know that revising and editing happen to everyone, and are not emergency procedures undertaken only in cases of scandalously unprofessional incompetence.Jun 27 2024 11:57PM
  • A problem that writing people have is the idea in their heads that a given sentence, paragraph or paper must be the right one. Their training in a land of “facts,” in the celebration of “right answers”—including the “right” way to approach their Chem lab book or English theme—immobilizes them at the keyboard. Their problem is that there are many right sentences, many right structures for an essay. . . . We have to free ourselves from the idea that there is only one CORRECT way. When we don’t, the contradiction with reality absolutely stifles us since no sentence, paragraph or paper is demonstrable (to ourselves) as clearly the right one. Students watch their words come out, but of course these words—in first draft—are not even meeting the test of “OK,” much less CORRECT and PERFECT ESSENCE OF CORRECT. Not having a vision of tentativeness, of first-draft, of n-draft, they can only feel frustration at the sight of failure. After a while, one sees the first tentative thoughts of a paragraph or paper as obviously failing this test—and so one doesn’t even start: writer’s cramp. The fear of failure is an accurate fear, because nobody could pass this self-imposed test of getting the one correct version, and the failure to do so is especially (and distressingly) evident at the point of first-draft.Jun 27 2024 11:59PM
  • I might substitute “shared beliefs” for “culture” and feel happier with that. But then I would see that I was talking about class and remember what a tangle of implications surrounds every one of the many ways sociologists talk about class. Whose version would I mean? W. Lloyd Warner’s? Karl Marx’s? I might decide to go back over the literature on class again before using such an expression. So I would start over again. But now I might notice that I had said, “As a result of something teachers something-or-other.” That is a pretty direct causal statement. Do I really think that social causality works like that? Shouldn’t I use some less committing expression? In short, every way to say it would start me down some path I hadn’t fully explored and might not want to take if I really understood what it would commit me to. The simplest remarks have implications I might not like, and I wouldn’t even know I was implying them. (Curious readers can see what I actually did by consulting Becker 1980.)Jun 28 2024 12:00AM
  • Introductions raise the problem of unwanted implications in a specially difficult way. Everett Hughes told me, when I was still in graduate school, to 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.”Jun 28 2024 12:01AM
  • 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. What about careers? How do all those things affect public education? People who make outlines do the same thing by making topic rather than sentence outlines. The minute you turn the topic headings into non-vacuous sentences, the problems the outline solved return.Jun 28 2024 12:01AM
  • Becoming an unwed mother is the outcome of a particular sequence of events that begins with forays into intimacy and sexuality, results in pregnancy, and terminates in the birth of an illegitimate child. Many girls do not have sexual relations before marriage. Many who do, do not get pregnant. And most girls who get pregnant while unmarried do not end up as unwed mothers. Girls who become unwed mothers, in this sense, share a common career that consists of the steps by which they came to be unwed mothers rather than brides, the clients of abortionists, contraceptively prepared lovers, or virtuous young ladies. The most significant aspects of this career are moral ones, for sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood are matters closely linked to conceptions of feminine respectability and [are] intimately connected to women’s conceptions of themselves. Becoming an unwed mother is not simply a private and practical trouble; it is the kind of trouble that forces public accounting, raises retrospective questions, and, above all, calls into question the kind of person the unwed mother was and is. The moral career of an unwed mother is, in this sense, like the moral careers of other persons whose acts are treated as deviant, and whose selves become publicly implicated. Important, if not central, to the moral career of such a person are the social agencies with which he may come into contact as a result of his situation. Social agencies and institutions, whether geared to rehabilitation, incarceration, help, or punishment, provide and enforce interpretations of the person’s current situation, of the past that led to it, and of the possibilities that lie ahead (Rains 1971, 1–2.).Jun 28 2024 12:04AM
  • Believers in Platonic perfection don’t like pragmatic compromises and accept them only when reality—the need to finish a paper or thesis, for instance—compels it.Jun 28 2024 1:10PM
  • There’s one further way of dealing with organizational problems. Instead of trying to solve the insoluble, you can talk about it. You can explain to readers why whatever it is is a problem, what ways of solving it you have thought about, why you chose the less-than-perfect solution you actually chose, and what it all means. The what-it-all-means will be interesting because you wouldn’t be having the problem if it didn’t embody some interesting dilemma in the work you are doing—for instance, the way problems of class and professional structure intersect in concrete organizations so that you can’t talk about class without talking about teachers’ shared perspectives on their professional relations, and can’t talk about those without talking about class. You have trouble only if you insist that, in principle, they have to be discussable separately.Jun 28 2024 5:49PM
  • I delayed writing this book for several years because I couldn’t find an interpretive frame to put around the social life I observed. Without that frame, I wasn’t sure that I understood the meaning of what I was seeing. Without that understanding, I had no posture toward the data, and that reduced my motivation to write. And when that understanding emerged, I didn’t like the “cynical” posture it invited me to take. (xxi)Jun 29 2024 2:59AM

Chapter i becker 12

  • Many rules, like those requiring that a declarative sentence end with a period or that writing proceed from left to right, do what conventions typically do in the arts: make it possible to communicate a thought by providing a minimum of shared understanding between creator and consumer. Other rules make it possible to communicate with less chance of unintended confusion and misunderstanding: rules requiring that pronouns agree with their antecedents, for instance.Jun 30 2024 1:28AM

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