Notes and quotes:
Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article
Howard S. Becker
Chapter 1: FRESHMAN ENGLISH FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
p. 14 - read
"Gusfield (1981) on the rhetoric of social science"
p. 16 - nice q
"Writing an early rough draft, then, shows you all the earlier decisions that now shape what you can write. You can’t “use” Marx if Durkheim’s ideas shaped your thinking. You can’t write about what the data you gathered don’t tell you about, or your method of storing them doesn’t let you use them for. You see what you have and don’t have, what you have already done and already know, and what’s left to do. You see that the only job left—even though you have just begun to write—is to make it all clearer."
Chapter 2: PERSONA AND AUTHORITY
p. 29 - overcome academic pose to overcome academic prose
"lack of ready intelligibility [in scholarly writing], I believe, usually has little or nothing to do with the complexity of the subject matter, and nothing at all with profundity of thought. It has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer about his own status. . . . In large part sociological habits of style stem from the time when sociologists had little status even with other academic men. Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so easily into unintelligibility. . . . To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose. (Mills 1959, 218–19, emphasis in the original.)"
p. 34 - im a will rogers
"Some writers—I favor this persona myself—take a Will Rogers line. We are just plain folks who emphasize our similarity to ordinary people, rather than the differences. We may know a few things others don’t, but it’s nothing special. “Shucks, you’d of thought the same as me if you’d just been there to see what I seen. It’s just that I had the time or took the trouble to be there, and you didn’t or couldn’t, but let me tell you about it.” Something like that. (In fact, this whole book is an extended example of that persona.)"
p. 35 - we show allegiance through our terms
"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."
p. 35 - we say who we are, rather than what we mean
"These are not just different words. They express different thoughts. Still, not that different. Code words don’t always contain a core of unique meaning, but we still use them rather than some other words that might lead people to think that we belong, or would like to belong, to some other school of thought. The allegiance-signaling purpose of stylistic devices is clearest when the author says things that conflict with the theory the language signals, when the desire to say “I am a functionalist” or “I am a Marxist” overcomes the desire to say what you mean."
p. 38 - bad pracgtices ring on... imagine now with LLMs
"Why do editors do that? Because nothing better is available. Because the number of journals has increased astronomically and the number of knowledgeable people available to do the required peer review is not large enough to handle the load which Andrew Abbott, for many years editor of the American Journal of Sociology, tells us leads to this work being done not by the knowledgeable senior scholar the term “peer review” implies but rather by graduate students who jump at the chance to do this grown-up job (Abbott 1999, 190–91). And so the journals provide the raw material for another generation to learn bad habits from."
Chapter 3: ONE RIGHT WAY
p. 49 - freewriting
"Once you know that writing a sentence down won’t hurt you, know it because you have tried it, you can do what I usually ask people to try: write whatever comes into your head, as fast as you can, 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. This is the device known to teachers of composition as “freewriting,” which I first heard of in Elbow (1981, 13–19) and then found in a less academic form in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (1994, 21–27), where it got the less academic name of “shitty first draft."
p. 50 - our thoughts on a certain matter form over time, not just when we write
"In short, by the time we come to write something, we have done a lot of thinking. We have an investment in everything we have already worked out that commits us to a point of view and a way of handling the problem. We probably couldn’t, even if we wanted to, handle the problem any differently from the way we will end up handling it. We are committed, not by the choice of a word, but by the analysis we have already done, by all our prior thinking and actions. That’s why it makes no difference how we begin. We chose our path and destination a long time ago."
p. 56 - obsidian ideas
"Using such a program, you begin the analysis by taking notes on what you’ve already written, putting each idea in an appropriate place on the screen. Don’t throw away any of the ideas contained in your notes since they might come in handy, even if you don’t see how at the moment. As you continue to type in the notes, arrange them under whatever topics and subtopics seem relevant to you, generating these labels as you go along and thereby actually beginning your analysis, but disguising it as the less serious and therefore less scary job of just copying your notes. This more or less “analyzes” your scattered ideas, putting the ones that seem to go together under the same heading in your growing outline. “Seem to go together?” Yes, and don’t look too closely, for the moment, for what they have in common. Follow your intuition."
Chapter 4: EDITING BY EAR
p. 64 - imagining somebody else reading or experiencing our work
"[This] suggests that they do not work by consulting a set of rules or criteria. Rather, they respond as they imagine others might respond, and construct those imaginings from their repeated experiences of hearing people apply the undefined terms in concrete situations. (Becker 1982a, 199–200)"
p. 78 - wind out of sails
"Take the common expression, “to take the wind out of someone’s sails.” I had used that, read it, and heard it for years, but it never meant any more to me than that you somehow deflated the person you did it to. Then I learned to sail. In sailing races, your opponents try to come between you and the wind, so that their sail keeps the wind from hitting yours. When they do that successfully, your sails, full of wind and pushing you along briskly a moment before, suddenly begin to flap emptily. The hull’s friction in the water, now that no wind is pushing to counteract it, brings the boat to a sudden halt. The metaphor came to life for me, recalling an irritating experience in all its fullness. But the metaphor means little or nothing to people who haven’t had that experience."
