Learning How to Write Better
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Anyone can learn to write well. This is not some innate skill like perfect pitch. Solid, even
elegant writing is an ability we acquire little by little, learning the proper uses of one verb or
preposition at a time, mastering long sentences then short ones -- and then figuring out
how to combine the two. We learn to compensate for our own stylistic idiosyncrasies,
whether these are an excessive use of adverbs or logical connectors or a tendency to
write one paragraph after another of exactly the same length.
The problem is, we don’t keep working at our writing ability. At some point, we decide we
write well enough. Complacency always blocks improvement. I’ve written more about this in
an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education. No one sets out to be a mediocre writer,
we just end up that way out of complacency.
One reason we stop working at our writing is this idea that some people are natural writers,
and most are not. This is like telling Isiah Thomas that he is a natural athlete. (Some of you
will remember the hullabaloo about his comments on this point in the early 1990s.) To say
this is to downplay all the hard work, intelligence, and other attributes that go into success
in sports. In that case, it also implies that black players are lazy compared to players like
Larry Bird. Of course NBA players have natural talent, but they need a lot more than that.
Writing is similar. To write great prose requires some intelligence, but not at some exalted
level the average academic does not have. (To write poetically may require skills that even
fewer have, but they are still not as rare as we think.) Much more, it requires continual
work at improvement, at honing the relevant skills. Most of us give up. We shouldn’t.
Teach Students to Write, and to Care about Writing
Do you care about writing? And do you try to cajole your students into caring about it?
What do you do? It is easier to explain why academics don’t even care about their own
writing than to figure out how to inspire our students. And if we write badly, what hope is
there for them? Occasional lip service is given to good writing, as to a liberal education
generally, but what gets done about it?
Almost universally, writing is taught in colleges as a distinct endeavor, divorced from
regular courses and subjects. Most often it is the subject of a dull semester-long class
required of first year students. Required courses face an uphill battle to start with. Those
about skills like writing, often taught by adjuncts, are impossible.
This is an artificial approach, as though writing is something you can learn all at once, then
use subsequently as you need to, like long division. Instead, we should see writing as
something to learn gradually and work at continually. It should be a small part of every
course.
If we are going to teach our students to write, we must persuade them that writing is
important. And to do that we must talk about it in regular classes from time to time, rather
than restricting it to a student’s first-semester initiation. If nothing else, talking about writing
in your class, even once in a semester, at least signals to students that you think it’s
important. Important enough to interrupt the regular subject matter.
In undergraduate classes, you have to require papers in order to teach writing. If you face
huge classes and can only offer multiple-choice exams, forget it. Papers written at home
provide an opportunity to discuss writing before and after the due dates. If nothing else,
you can discuss simple usage problems, often drawn from amusing mistakes such as
feudal versus futile. (I try to use examples from past courses to avoid embarrassing
anyone present, even though embarrassment is a powerful heuristic.) Everyone who has
taught for a while has her own list of common errors. Undergrads simply don’t know how to
use a lot of words.
From this detailed level I usually jump to the broadest: how to structure a paper. I discuss
how to make an argument, how to adduce evidence, how to open and close. Even the best
undergrads rarely understand the functions of paragraphs, of sentences.
I also grade papers partly on how well they are written. This gets students’ attention.
Graduate-student writing can also be improved. As I wrote in that Chronicle column, the
trick here is usually persuading them that there is room for improvement. They are usually
adequate writers, and have been told at various stages in their education that they were
good writers. For them, I usually concentrate on the desirability of going through many
revisions, in order to break them of the undergraduate one-shot, all-night approach to
writing papers (as though papers were exams).
In graduate classes (and sometimes small undergrad classes), my favorite exercise is the
Word Elimination Game. Everyone brings the first page of the best paper they’ve written,
enough copies for all of us. We pick several. Individually, we each spend five minutes
going through the first paragraph, trying to eliminate words without changing the meaning.
Then as a group we do the same thing. In many cases we can get rid not only of words,
but of entire sentences, occasionally the entire paragraph! We think about every word and
what it contributes to the meaning. (I teach them to be especially suspicious of adverbs,
because I myself am forever sticking “very” and the like into first drafts.) As Mark Twain
advised, “Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it
and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Students have never had that kind of attention paid to their writing before. We may get
through several students this way, or spread them out over several classes. (In a later
class, I may pair them up for the same exercise with each other, in a briefer form, just to
keep them in practice.) No one will ever be a good writer if she cannot do this kind of line
editing. Gradually they become “natural’ writers.
I use another exercise for meaning. Each student reads another student’s first paragraph,
in just a couple minutes, then writes down a sentence summarizing it. Sometimes I ask the
authors to summarize their own paragraphs in similar fashion. Then we compare.
Sometimes I ask several students to sum up the same paragraph, and we compare those.
The point here is to make a concise opening statement that does not beat around the
bush. (In more literary disciplines that favor striking vignettes as openings, you may have
to read further into the paper.)
My friend Chip Clarke uses another writing exercise. Students write a reverse outline of
something they have written, pulling out the summary of the text. This is especially useful
for those who (often following Howard Becker) write without outlining first. It helps students
think about the function of paragraphs, Chip says.
Writing is not the only skill that our students could improve. When a student is having
trouble, I often ask to see her class notes. Have you ever tried this? Have you compared
them to what you hope the students would take away from class? The gap can be
enormous. Some students write down trivial words, or copy down the first few words of
each statement, missing the key point. I encourage students to learn a little shorthand, or
make up some abbreviations and notations of their own, so they don’t spend too much
time on transcription itself. Other students need help reading. They need to learn different
ways to read, for different purposes. They must learn how to look for different things, how
to underline text and make notes in margins for later retrieval, how to make their own
indices at the backs of the books. But this is relatively straightforward compared to writing.
In many cases, skills like these are more important than the substance of a course, which
students will soon forget. In some courses, a class period or two per semester could be
devoted to writing. (I used to find this especially useful when I was preparing a new
undergrad course, and didn’t quite have enough lectures yet.) In others, a few minutes of
several classes.
Most colleges and universities today have writing centers where students can get help with
the craft of writing. I find they are sadly underutilized, perhaps because they carry a
stigma. They are thought to be – and therefore partly have become – places for people
with writing problems (we again see the widespread assumption that either you can write or
you cannot). Students resist the idea that everyone could benefit from a session there. I
have tried requiring everyone in a class to go, but this is deeply resented and hard to
enforce. But I would urge all faculty to try to make use of these facilities any way you can.
Some faculty should go there themselves.
Writing, it should go without saying, is a broadly useful skill. If you can’t write well, you are
probably not thinking well either. Writing well helps students become better readers, too,
as they are more aware of style. No other skill we teach them is so certain to be helpful
later. It will stick with graduates long after they have forgotten the effects of Protestantism
on early capitalism. What’s fundamental is to show them that writing matters, that we care
how they (and we) write. Grad students are different.
The Rotten Truth
One reason scholars don’t keep working at their writing is that there are almost no
professional rewards for good writing. In sociology, there is respect for good research, not
for a stylish presentation. No article was ever turned down by the American Sociological
Review for poor writing – a sad fact patently obvious to anyone who reads that august
journal. The only incentives to write well are your inner pride, and the occasional
whispered comment among colleagues that you write well, typically said with secret envy
and perhaps the implication that your writing covers shoddy research. Be brave. Work on
your writing anyway.
Word Elimination
I’ll share a few common examples of unnecessarily wordy construction, some of which I
hope will sound familiar. These are the kind of thing I look for in the Elimination Game.
There is the obsessive use of logical connectors, like “however,” or “thus.” If the
relationship between two successive sentences isn’t clear without these, from their internal
substance, you’re already in trouble. (I could have said, “then you’re already in trouble,” or
“thus you’re already in trouble.”)
There are also phrases that mean nothing at all, like “In this regard”…
Here’s an example: “Religious people who longed to once again, or perhaps for the first
time, experience participating in something like the civil rights movement…” There’s plenty
to change here, but let me just point out one, the doubling of the verbs, “experience
participating in.” It’s much better – in reality and writing -- to experience something, or to
participate in something, than to experience participating in something.
There can also be a doubling of meaning by asking verbs and nouns to do the same work:
“Religion and spirituality were not simply added on as an afterthought.” Well, an
afterthought IS something added on, so we can just say, “Religion and spirituality were not
simply an afterthought.” Or more simply, “were not an afterthought.”
Another way of complicating our prose is to create a clause where a participle would do:
“Clergy and people of faith who are today actively working for immigrant rights believe…”
need only be, “Clergy and people of faith actively working for immigrant rights.” A relatively
smooth participle replaces a whole awkward clause. Those who were trained in high school
to diagram sentences can appreciate or at least recognize how to simplify them.
On the other hand, some verbs can simplify the work of a glob of nouns and prepositions.
“They worked to implement laws against the 12-hour work day” easily becomes, “They
worked to ban the 12-hour work day.” Three words become one. We could even write,
“They fought the 12-hour work day.”
The principle in all these cases is the elimination of unnecessary words and phrases.
Would the meaning change if it were removed?
The result is a kind of spare, Strunk-and-White style. And unless you’re a poet-turned-
sociologist, I can almost guarantee this is the style that will be best for you. You avoid the
embarrassment of a pseudo-literary effort that falls flat, while serving your readers in
getting your argument across in the least painful way. You keep them reading.
Edit, Edit, Edit
“The best writing is rewriting,” E. B. White said. However they do it, graduate students must
learn to edit their work. They have never done this before, thanks to an undergraduate
system that leaves them little time or incentive for it. Showing them how to go through
many, many drafts is one of the main ways we can transform them from students into
scholars.
Since editing requires you to read your own work, it is a good chance to think about your
audiences. Always be clear about who you are writing for. (And don’t be too
schoolmarmish about grammar. I should have written “whom” just then, but as Calvin Trillin
remarked, “As far as I'm concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone
sound like a butler.”) What does your audience know already? How do they think and feel?
What is going to interest them, make them curious, keep them reading? Figure out “where
they’re at” so that you can take them somewhere else. This is the main lesson of 2400
years of rhetoric. And it is just as true of academic audiences as popular ones. Find a
hook that will interest them.
There are different kinds of things to do to your prose as you rewrite, beyond the
Strunkian elimination of unnecessary words. “Work on good prose has three steps,”
according to Walter Benjamin: “a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one
when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.” This sounds good if you don’t think
about it too hard.
At the most basic level we work on the logic of what we say. We aim for clarity, for empirical
facts that will persuade skeptics. Even this is missing in a lot of scholarship, which can be
filled with non sequiturs, slippage among concepts, evidence that doesn’t quite address
the theory, and other sorts of sloppy thinking. Qualitative researchers are often especially
guilty, since they have fewer canons for presenting their empirical evidence, and they are
rarely testing hypotheses. Writing precisely about causality can be especially difficult.
(Michael Young and I wrote an article about some of the tricks, conscious and
unconscious, that sociologists use to distort and exaggerate their findings. Click here to
read the proof version of it.)
The next level involves the flow of our prose and its concision. These are also issues of
clarity, but force us to think more about how our audiences are likely to follow what we
write. I think these first two levels are what most graduate students and even practicing Ph.
D.s are grappling with. And if you want to get basic information into print, on the record,
this is enough.
The third level is about encouraging people to actually read that record. This is the
dynamism of the flow: how to hook readers, how to vary the pace of your prose, how to
vary your sentences to keep the reader’s interest, and so on. Ross-Larson’s book,
Stunning Sentences, will already take you way beyond the level at which most social
scientists write.
The final level encroaches on the realm of fiction and poetry. Here we think about the
sound of words as they flow and about their connotations and etymologies. So for example
if we begin a paragraph with a verb that connotes one activity, we should try not to switch
later to verbs that connote different activities. If we talk about social construction, we can
use verbs such as build and craft, noun s like edifice or creation. It is subtly jarring to a
well-trained reader if we start talking about evolution or discovery or digging, all metaphors
from different families. Even if your reader is unaware of the image you are trying to create
in her mind, she will grasp what you are saying better if there is some consistency.
Many connotations derive from etymology, as Gadamer showed in German philosophy.
Those who have studied (and remember) Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit can have fun with
these meanings. The rest of us cannot.
But it also is at this level that a fresh metaphor or image differs from a stale one. It is at this
level that complacent social scientists frequently fall back on hoary metaphors so easily
that we forget they are metaphors. Power, networks, structure, construction, revolutions,
social movements, and more. What are we really talking about when we talk about these?
In How Fiction Works James Woods talks about this level: "We have to read musically,
testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of
historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns,
repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging
how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with
mathematical finality." Even those who write novels for a living, according to Woods, have
difficulty developing this "third ear"; how much harder it is for social scientists!
Good Writing is not Overwriting
When I edited Contexts magazine, I dealt with sociologists trying to break out of their
normal writing habits. When sociologists try to write for a broader audience, for instance, a
lot of them go all literary. They tend to overwrite, adding similes and descriptions they think
are “literary.” They know that novelists observe details, and they think they should do the
same thing, without really being able to distinguish a new trope from a hackneyed one.
So when they switch from talking about, say, “39% of the females in our sample”
(admittedly a deadly construction), to talking about an actual woman, she becomes a “tall
woman,” or a “tall, black woman.” Now, being black, or being a woman may be an important
demographic variable, but it is dull prose. (I won’t even touch the fact that sociologists, so
critical of racial stereotypes, often add racial identifiers when they have no relevance.)
This is what we do not hear: “Her whole figure…gave an impression of perfection, fixity,
completion and acceptance, as if there were no room in her for change, emendation or
denial – like the days that are ended, like legends, like the liturgy of established religions,
like the paintings from centuries past that no-one would dare to touch.” (That is from Javier
Marias’ The Man of Feeling, page 6.) That’s how a novelist observes things. And in fact
that is what Marias had seen, a woman on a train, the scene that inspired him to write A
Man of Feeling.
If we could make up new images and metaphors like that, we’d probably be poets, not
sociologists.
Another kind of overwriting comes from the abuse of the thesaurus. I use my word
processor’s thesaurus all the time. But you need to have a writer’s sense of which word on
the list has the right nuances, something you get mostly from years of reading English
novels from the nineteenth century. You shouldn’t use it just to vary the words you use, as
you can easily pick a synonym that jars the reader rather than imparts nuanced (often
subconscious) information. This is a special challenge for non-native speakers of a
language.
A Brief Tutorial
I recommend that you read a few books about writing, as long as you never let your
reading displace your writing. Nothing helps writing so much as practice, but informed
practice is better than uninformed. Here are some of my favorites.
Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. Strunk and White aim for a pared-
down simple style that should be the model for social scientists. Hemingway rather than
Pynchon. Virtually none of us have the dexterity with words to develop a distinctive style,
so go for reducing excess. Read this short book from time to time until you have
internalized its approach.
Line by Line, by Claire Kehrwald Cook. Sponsored by the Modern Language Association,
this book shows how to eliminate various kinds of awkwardness.
Stunning Sentences, by Bruce Ross-Larson. This is the most useful of his Effective Writing
series, because it is aimed at the level where most social scientists need help. Most of us
have learned to write clearly, but not well, and Ross-Larson shows us how to vary our
sentences in pleasing ways.
Writing Tools, by Roy Peter Clark. Although mostly written with fiction in mind, this book
tells you how to keep someone reading. Most of its tools are useful to social scientists, and
even the ones that are not will help you think about how what you write differs from fiction
(when it does).
I would also recommend purchasing a fat book on usage, like Fowler’s, for reference. I
enjoy skimming books like these, and inevitably learn something I’ve been doing wrong,
but that’s a weird taste.
There are also books for social scientists, for example by sociologists Eviatar Zerubavel
(The Clockwork Muse) and Howard Becker (Writing for Social Scientists), which are
amusing reads but deeply reflect the personalities and working styles of the authors. You
might be similar to one of them, though, so it might work for you.
And if you only have time to read one short essay right now, choose this one:
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language.”
Although Jonathan Wynn suggests another brief essay by Kurt Vonnegut.
elegant writing is an ability we acquire little by little, learning the proper uses of one verb or
preposition at a time, mastering long sentences then short ones -- and then figuring out
how to combine the two. We learn to compensate for our own stylistic idiosyncrasies,
whether these are an excessive use of adverbs or logical connectors or a tendency to
write one paragraph after another of exactly the same length.
The problem is, we don’t keep working at our writing ability. At some point, we decide we
write well enough. Complacency always blocks improvement. I’ve written more about this in
an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education. No one sets out to be a mediocre writer,
we just end up that way out of complacency.
One reason we stop working at our writing is this idea that some people are natural writers,
and most are not. This is like telling Isiah Thomas that he is a natural athlete. (Some of you
will remember the hullabaloo about his comments on this point in the early 1990s.) To say
this is to downplay all the hard work, intelligence, and other attributes that go into success
in sports. In that case, it also implies that black players are lazy compared to players like
Larry Bird. Of course NBA players have natural talent, but they need a lot more than that.
Writing is similar. To write great prose requires some intelligence, but not at some exalted
level the average academic does not have. (To write poetically may require skills that even
fewer have, but they are still not as rare as we think.) Much more, it requires continual
work at improvement, at honing the relevant skills. Most of us give up. We shouldn’t.
Teach Students to Write, and to Care about Writing
Do you care about writing? And do you try to cajole your students into caring about it?
What do you do? It is easier to explain why academics don’t even care about their own
writing than to figure out how to inspire our students. And if we write badly, what hope is
there for them? Occasional lip service is given to good writing, as to a liberal education
generally, but what gets done about it?
Almost universally, writing is taught in colleges as a distinct endeavor, divorced from
regular courses and subjects. Most often it is the subject of a dull semester-long class
required of first year students. Required courses face an uphill battle to start with. Those
about skills like writing, often taught by adjuncts, are impossible.
This is an artificial approach, as though writing is something you can learn all at once, then
use subsequently as you need to, like long division. Instead, we should see writing as
something to learn gradually and work at continually. It should be a small part of every
course.
If we are going to teach our students to write, we must persuade them that writing is
important. And to do that we must talk about it in regular classes from time to time, rather
than restricting it to a student’s first-semester initiation. If nothing else, talking about writing
in your class, even once in a semester, at least signals to students that you think it’s
important. Important enough to interrupt the regular subject matter.
In undergraduate classes, you have to require papers in order to teach writing. If you face
huge classes and can only offer multiple-choice exams, forget it. Papers written at home
provide an opportunity to discuss writing before and after the due dates. If nothing else,
you can discuss simple usage problems, often drawn from amusing mistakes such as
feudal versus futile. (I try to use examples from past courses to avoid embarrassing
anyone present, even though embarrassment is a powerful heuristic.) Everyone who has
taught for a while has her own list of common errors. Undergrads simply don’t know how to
use a lot of words.
From this detailed level I usually jump to the broadest: how to structure a paper. I discuss
how to make an argument, how to adduce evidence, how to open and close. Even the best
undergrads rarely understand the functions of paragraphs, of sentences.
I also grade papers partly on how well they are written. This gets students’ attention.
Graduate-student writing can also be improved. As I wrote in that Chronicle column, the
trick here is usually persuading them that there is room for improvement. They are usually
adequate writers, and have been told at various stages in their education that they were
good writers. For them, I usually concentrate on the desirability of going through many
revisions, in order to break them of the undergraduate one-shot, all-night approach to
writing papers (as though papers were exams).
In graduate classes (and sometimes small undergrad classes), my favorite exercise is the
Word Elimination Game. Everyone brings the first page of the best paper they’ve written,
enough copies for all of us. We pick several. Individually, we each spend five minutes
going through the first paragraph, trying to eliminate words without changing the meaning.
Then as a group we do the same thing. In many cases we can get rid not only of words,
but of entire sentences, occasionally the entire paragraph! We think about every word and
what it contributes to the meaning. (I teach them to be especially suspicious of adverbs,
because I myself am forever sticking “very” and the like into first drafts.) As Mark Twain
advised, “Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it
and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Students have never had that kind of attention paid to their writing before. We may get
through several students this way, or spread them out over several classes. (In a later
class, I may pair them up for the same exercise with each other, in a briefer form, just to
keep them in practice.) No one will ever be a good writer if she cannot do this kind of line
editing. Gradually they become “natural’ writers.
I use another exercise for meaning. Each student reads another student’s first paragraph,
in just a couple minutes, then writes down a sentence summarizing it. Sometimes I ask the
authors to summarize their own paragraphs in similar fashion. Then we compare.
Sometimes I ask several students to sum up the same paragraph, and we compare those.
The point here is to make a concise opening statement that does not beat around the
bush. (In more literary disciplines that favor striking vignettes as openings, you may have
to read further into the paper.)
My friend Chip Clarke uses another writing exercise. Students write a reverse outline of
something they have written, pulling out the summary of the text. This is especially useful
for those who (often following Howard Becker) write without outlining first. It helps students
think about the function of paragraphs, Chip says.
Writing is not the only skill that our students could improve. When a student is having
trouble, I often ask to see her class notes. Have you ever tried this? Have you compared
them to what you hope the students would take away from class? The gap can be
enormous. Some students write down trivial words, or copy down the first few words of
each statement, missing the key point. I encourage students to learn a little shorthand, or
make up some abbreviations and notations of their own, so they don’t spend too much
time on transcription itself. Other students need help reading. They need to learn different
ways to read, for different purposes. They must learn how to look for different things, how
to underline text and make notes in margins for later retrieval, how to make their own
indices at the backs of the books. But this is relatively straightforward compared to writing.
In many cases, skills like these are more important than the substance of a course, which
students will soon forget. In some courses, a class period or two per semester could be
devoted to writing. (I used to find this especially useful when I was preparing a new
undergrad course, and didn’t quite have enough lectures yet.) In others, a few minutes of
several classes.
Most colleges and universities today have writing centers where students can get help with
the craft of writing. I find they are sadly underutilized, perhaps because they carry a
stigma. They are thought to be – and therefore partly have become – places for people
with writing problems (we again see the widespread assumption that either you can write or
you cannot). Students resist the idea that everyone could benefit from a session there. I
have tried requiring everyone in a class to go, but this is deeply resented and hard to
enforce. But I would urge all faculty to try to make use of these facilities any way you can.
Some faculty should go there themselves.
Writing, it should go without saying, is a broadly useful skill. If you can’t write well, you are
probably not thinking well either. Writing well helps students become better readers, too,
as they are more aware of style. No other skill we teach them is so certain to be helpful
later. It will stick with graduates long after they have forgotten the effects of Protestantism
on early capitalism. What’s fundamental is to show them that writing matters, that we care
how they (and we) write. Grad students are different.
The Rotten Truth
One reason scholars don’t keep working at their writing is that there are almost no
professional rewards for good writing. In sociology, there is respect for good research, not
for a stylish presentation. No article was ever turned down by the American Sociological
Review for poor writing – a sad fact patently obvious to anyone who reads that august
journal. The only incentives to write well are your inner pride, and the occasional
whispered comment among colleagues that you write well, typically said with secret envy
and perhaps the implication that your writing covers shoddy research. Be brave. Work on
your writing anyway.
Word Elimination
I’ll share a few common examples of unnecessarily wordy construction, some of which I
hope will sound familiar. These are the kind of thing I look for in the Elimination Game.
There is the obsessive use of logical connectors, like “however,” or “thus.” If the
relationship between two successive sentences isn’t clear without these, from their internal
substance, you’re already in trouble. (I could have said, “then you’re already in trouble,” or
“thus you’re already in trouble.”)
There are also phrases that mean nothing at all, like “In this regard”…
Here’s an example: “Religious people who longed to once again, or perhaps for the first
time, experience participating in something like the civil rights movement…” There’s plenty
to change here, but let me just point out one, the doubling of the verbs, “experience
participating in.” It’s much better – in reality and writing -- to experience something, or to
participate in something, than to experience participating in something.
There can also be a doubling of meaning by asking verbs and nouns to do the same work:
“Religion and spirituality were not simply added on as an afterthought.” Well, an
afterthought IS something added on, so we can just say, “Religion and spirituality were not
simply an afterthought.” Or more simply, “were not an afterthought.”
Another way of complicating our prose is to create a clause where a participle would do:
“Clergy and people of faith who are today actively working for immigrant rights believe…”
need only be, “Clergy and people of faith actively working for immigrant rights.” A relatively
smooth participle replaces a whole awkward clause. Those who were trained in high school
to diagram sentences can appreciate or at least recognize how to simplify them.
On the other hand, some verbs can simplify the work of a glob of nouns and prepositions.
“They worked to implement laws against the 12-hour work day” easily becomes, “They
worked to ban the 12-hour work day.” Three words become one. We could even write,
“They fought the 12-hour work day.”
The principle in all these cases is the elimination of unnecessary words and phrases.
Would the meaning change if it were removed?
The result is a kind of spare, Strunk-and-White style. And unless you’re a poet-turned-
sociologist, I can almost guarantee this is the style that will be best for you. You avoid the
embarrassment of a pseudo-literary effort that falls flat, while serving your readers in
getting your argument across in the least painful way. You keep them reading.
Edit, Edit, Edit
“The best writing is rewriting,” E. B. White said. However they do it, graduate students must
learn to edit their work. They have never done this before, thanks to an undergraduate
system that leaves them little time or incentive for it. Showing them how to go through
many, many drafts is one of the main ways we can transform them from students into
scholars.
Since editing requires you to read your own work, it is a good chance to think about your
audiences. Always be clear about who you are writing for. (And don’t be too
schoolmarmish about grammar. I should have written “whom” just then, but as Calvin Trillin
remarked, “As far as I'm concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone
sound like a butler.”) What does your audience know already? How do they think and feel?
What is going to interest them, make them curious, keep them reading? Figure out “where
they’re at” so that you can take them somewhere else. This is the main lesson of 2400
years of rhetoric. And it is just as true of academic audiences as popular ones. Find a
hook that will interest them.
There are different kinds of things to do to your prose as you rewrite, beyond the
Strunkian elimination of unnecessary words. “Work on good prose has three steps,”
according to Walter Benjamin: “a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one
when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.” This sounds good if you don’t think
about it too hard.
At the most basic level we work on the logic of what we say. We aim for clarity, for empirical
facts that will persuade skeptics. Even this is missing in a lot of scholarship, which can be
filled with non sequiturs, slippage among concepts, evidence that doesn’t quite address
the theory, and other sorts of sloppy thinking. Qualitative researchers are often especially
guilty, since they have fewer canons for presenting their empirical evidence, and they are
rarely testing hypotheses. Writing precisely about causality can be especially difficult.
(Michael Young and I wrote an article about some of the tricks, conscious and
unconscious, that sociologists use to distort and exaggerate their findings. Click here to
read the proof version of it.)
The next level involves the flow of our prose and its concision. These are also issues of
clarity, but force us to think more about how our audiences are likely to follow what we
write. I think these first two levels are what most graduate students and even practicing Ph.
D.s are grappling with. And if you want to get basic information into print, on the record,
this is enough.
The third level is about encouraging people to actually read that record. This is the
dynamism of the flow: how to hook readers, how to vary the pace of your prose, how to
vary your sentences to keep the reader’s interest, and so on. Ross-Larson’s book,
Stunning Sentences, will already take you way beyond the level at which most social
scientists write.
The final level encroaches on the realm of fiction and poetry. Here we think about the
sound of words as they flow and about their connotations and etymologies. So for example
if we begin a paragraph with a verb that connotes one activity, we should try not to switch
later to verbs that connote different activities. If we talk about social construction, we can
use verbs such as build and craft, noun s like edifice or creation. It is subtly jarring to a
well-trained reader if we start talking about evolution or discovery or digging, all metaphors
from different families. Even if your reader is unaware of the image you are trying to create
in her mind, she will grasp what you are saying better if there is some consistency.
Many connotations derive from etymology, as Gadamer showed in German philosophy.
Those who have studied (and remember) Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit can have fun with
these meanings. The rest of us cannot.
But it also is at this level that a fresh metaphor or image differs from a stale one. It is at this
level that complacent social scientists frequently fall back on hoary metaphors so easily
that we forget they are metaphors. Power, networks, structure, construction, revolutions,
social movements, and more. What are we really talking about when we talk about these?
In How Fiction Works James Woods talks about this level: "We have to read musically,
testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of
historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns,
repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging
how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with
mathematical finality." Even those who write novels for a living, according to Woods, have
difficulty developing this "third ear"; how much harder it is for social scientists!
Good Writing is not Overwriting
When I edited Contexts magazine, I dealt with sociologists trying to break out of their
normal writing habits. When sociologists try to write for a broader audience, for instance, a
lot of them go all literary. They tend to overwrite, adding similes and descriptions they think
are “literary.” They know that novelists observe details, and they think they should do the
same thing, without really being able to distinguish a new trope from a hackneyed one.
So when they switch from talking about, say, “39% of the females in our sample”
(admittedly a deadly construction), to talking about an actual woman, she becomes a “tall
woman,” or a “tall, black woman.” Now, being black, or being a woman may be an important
demographic variable, but it is dull prose. (I won’t even touch the fact that sociologists, so
critical of racial stereotypes, often add racial identifiers when they have no relevance.)
This is what we do not hear: “Her whole figure…gave an impression of perfection, fixity,
completion and acceptance, as if there were no room in her for change, emendation or
denial – like the days that are ended, like legends, like the liturgy of established religions,
like the paintings from centuries past that no-one would dare to touch.” (That is from Javier
Marias’ The Man of Feeling, page 6.) That’s how a novelist observes things. And in fact
that is what Marias had seen, a woman on a train, the scene that inspired him to write A
Man of Feeling.
If we could make up new images and metaphors like that, we’d probably be poets, not
sociologists.
Another kind of overwriting comes from the abuse of the thesaurus. I use my word
processor’s thesaurus all the time. But you need to have a writer’s sense of which word on
the list has the right nuances, something you get mostly from years of reading English
novels from the nineteenth century. You shouldn’t use it just to vary the words you use, as
you can easily pick a synonym that jars the reader rather than imparts nuanced (often
subconscious) information. This is a special challenge for non-native speakers of a
language.
A Brief Tutorial
I recommend that you read a few books about writing, as long as you never let your
reading displace your writing. Nothing helps writing so much as practice, but informed
practice is better than uninformed. Here are some of my favorites.
Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. Strunk and White aim for a pared-
down simple style that should be the model for social scientists. Hemingway rather than
Pynchon. Virtually none of us have the dexterity with words to develop a distinctive style,
so go for reducing excess. Read this short book from time to time until you have
internalized its approach.
Line by Line, by Claire Kehrwald Cook. Sponsored by the Modern Language Association,
this book shows how to eliminate various kinds of awkwardness.
Stunning Sentences, by Bruce Ross-Larson. This is the most useful of his Effective Writing
series, because it is aimed at the level where most social scientists need help. Most of us
have learned to write clearly, but not well, and Ross-Larson shows us how to vary our
sentences in pleasing ways.
Writing Tools, by Roy Peter Clark. Although mostly written with fiction in mind, this book
tells you how to keep someone reading. Most of its tools are useful to social scientists, and
even the ones that are not will help you think about how what you write differs from fiction
(when it does).
I would also recommend purchasing a fat book on usage, like Fowler’s, for reference. I
enjoy skimming books like these, and inevitably learn something I’ve been doing wrong,
but that’s a weird taste.
There are also books for social scientists, for example by sociologists Eviatar Zerubavel
(The Clockwork Muse) and Howard Becker (Writing for Social Scientists), which are
amusing reads but deeply reflect the personalities and working styles of the authors. You
might be similar to one of them, though, so it might work for you.
And if you only have time to read one short essay right now, choose this one:
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language.”
Although Jonathan Wynn suggests another brief essay by Kurt Vonnegut.