Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article

212 Pages·2007·5.03 MB·English

by  Howard S. Becker

Writing for Social Scientists
On Writing, Editing, and Publishing Doing Honest Work in College
Jacques Barzun Charles Lipson
Telling About Society How to Write a BA Thesis
Howard S. Becker Charles Lipson
Tricks of the Trade Cite Right
Howard S. Becker Charles Lipson
Permissions, A Survival Guide: The Chicago Guide to Writing about
Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Multivariate Analysis
Property Jane E. Miller
Susan M. Bielstein
The Chicago Guide to Writing about
The Craft of Translation Numbers
John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, Jane E. Miller
editors
Mapping It Out
The Craft of Research Mark Monmonier
Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G.
Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams The Chicago Guide to
Communicating Science
Glossary of Typesetting Terms Scott L. Montgomery
Richard Eckersley, Richard
Angstadt, Charles M. Ellerston, Indexing Books
Richard Hendel, Naomi B. Pascal, Nancy C. Mulvany
and Anita Walker Scott
Gettinginto Print
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes Walter W. Powell
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz,
and Linda L. Shaw A Manual for Writers of Research
Papers, Theses, and Dissertations
Legal Writing in Plain English Kate L. Turabian
Bryan A. Garner
Tales of the Field
From Dissertation to Book John Van Maanen
William Germano
Style
Getting It Published Joseph M. Williams
William Germano
A Handbook of Biological
A Poet’s Guide to Poetry Illustration
Mary Kinzie Frances W. Zweifel
The Chicago Guide to Collaborative
Ethnography
Luke Eric Lassiter
Writing for
Social
Scientists
How to Start and
Finish Your Thesis,
Book, or Article
Second Edition
Howard S. Becker
with a chapter by Pamela Richards
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
Howard S. Becker is a sociologist and the author of
Outsiders,Tricks of the Trade,andTelling About Society.
The drawings reproduced at the chapter openings of this
book are by Claire Bretécher and first appeared under the
title “Création” in Les Frustrés3, © Le Nouvel Observateur.
Chapter 1 appeared, in slightly different form, in The
Sociological Quarterly,vol. 24 (Autumn 1983), and
is reprinted here with the permission of the Midwest
Sociological Society.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1986, 2007 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2007
Printed in the United States of America
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04130-8 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04132-2 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04130-1 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04132-8 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Becker, Howard Saul, 1928–
Writing for social scientists : how to start and finish your
thesis, book, or article / Howard S. Becker ; with a chapter
by Pamela Richards. — 2nd ed.
p. cm. — (Chicago guides to writing, editing, and
publishing)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04130-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04132-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04130-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04132-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social
sciences—Authorship. 2. Sociology—Authorship.
3. Academic writing. 4. Communication in the social
sciences. I. Richards, Pamela. II. Title.
H61.8.B43 2007
808(cid:2).0663—dc22
2007012022
øThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Preface to the
Second Edition vii
1986 Preface ix
1.Freshman English 6.Risk,by
for Graduate Pamela Richards
Students 1 108
2. 7.
Persona and Getting It out the
Authority 26 Door 121
3. 8.
One Right Way Terrorized by the
43 Literature 135
4. 9.
Editing by Ear Writing with
68 Computers 150
5.Learning to 10.
Write as a A Final Word
Professional 90 173
References 185
Index 193

Preface to the
Second Edition
I
wrote the first version of this book in the early 1980s.
It came very easily. I had been teaching writing to grad-
uate students for a few years, and that experience had
given me a lot to think about and a lot of stories to tell.
The stories generally had a point, a small lesson about
why we have the problems we do in writing, or a pos-
sibility of avoiding those problems, or a way of think-
ing that would make the problem seem less problem-
atic. After the first chapter appeared in a journal, and
excited some discussion, I saw that that I had a begin-
ning, and the rest of the book almost wrote itself.
Nothing prepared me for the steady stream of mail
from readers who had found the book helpful. Not just
helpful. Several told me that the book had saved their
lives; less a testimony to the book as therapy than a re-
flection of the seriousness of the trouble writing failure
could get people into. Many told me that they had
taken to giving the book to friends who were having se-
vii
Preface to the Second Edition viii
rious problems. It’s not surprising, given the degree to
which our fate in the academic environments we write
in as students, teachers, and researchers hangs on our
ability to turn out acceptable prose on demand. When
you can’t do that, your confidence goes down and that
makes it harder to get the next writing chore done, and
before you know it you can’t see a way out. So the book,
suggesting new ways of looking at these dilemmas,
gave people hope and helped at least some of them get
the spiral going in the other direction.
I wasn’t prepared, either, for the thank yous from
people in fields far from my own discipline of sociol-
ogy. Much of the analysis in the book is straightfor-
wardly and unapologetically sociological, finding the
roots of writing problems and the possibilities of their
solution in social organization. Many of the specific
problems that produce the convoluted, almost unread-
able prose readers complain of as “academic” seemed
to me then to arise from such specifically sociological
worries as wanting to avoid making causal statements
when you knew you didn’t have the proof that kind of
talk required (that’s taken up in Chapter 1). I found out
that people in many other fields—art history, commu-
nications, literature, it was a long and surprising list—
had similar difficulties. I hadn’t had them in mind, but
the shoe seemed to fit.
Many things haven’t changed since this book first ap-
peared. But some have, which made it seem like a good
idea to say something about the changes and how they
affect our situations as writers. The major changes have
occurred with respect to computers, which were just
beginning to be the way everyone wrote when I started
this book and now have become the standard; I talk
about those changes in an optimistic spirit in the addi-
tions to Chapter 9. And the organization of universities
and academic life, about which I have less optimistic
things to say, in Chapter 10. I hope these additions will
make the book continue to seem relevant to your con-
cerns.
Howard S. Becker
San Francisco, 2007
ix