A Good Sociologist Is A Good Writer:
Tips, Principles, Observations, and Unconventional Advice
for New Graduate Students
Harry G. Levine
Department of Sociology
Queens College, City University of New York
I first studied sociology as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. Lewis Coser and Philip Slater were my teachers and role models. They invited me to write a senior thesis and taught me how to write sociology by correcting my drafts. When Coser really liked a chapter, he would scrawl "Bravo" across the top of the first page and then he would edit everything. Even though English was his third or fourth language, he was a very good writer and a wonderful editor.
I went to graduate school in Berkeley in the 1970s. Almost no students at Berkeley received training in how to write professional sociology that compared to what Coser and Slater had taught me. Eventually I understood that my undergraduate experiences were unusual and my graduate student ones more typical.
In 1978 when I finished my dissertation, "publish or perish" was the name of the academic game. That is even more the case in the high-tech, email and internet connected world of the twenty-first century. The limited job market for Ph.D.'s means that a successful career as a research sociologist requires being a publishable and moderately productive writer. Even with that economic reality, Ph.D. graduate schools in all fields still rarely provide direct training in writing or teaching. For better or worse, most successful professors have learned to write on their own.
A few years ago, I was asked to talk about being a sociologist to a seminar for new Ph.D. students at the graduate center of the City University of New York. I used the occasion to summarize some of the most useful things I had learned over the years about writing sociology. I wish someone had said these things to me. Like all advice, these "tips, observations and principles" should be taken with many grains of salt.
1. A Good Sociologist is a Good Writer
Becoming a good writer is a shrewd career move. A sociologist is a writer. As sociologists, writing is our job, our craft. Academics in all fields who write well find it easier to get publishers and easier to get readers. Poor and dull writers find it hard to get read and taken seriously. Too few students understand this when they begin graduate school. Learn it now. Understand that good writers think of themselves as writers. If you regard yourself as a writer, and try to become a good writer, you will be way ahead of the pack.
Good writers take notes. Take good notes if possible, but messy, confusing and incomplete notes will do in a pinch. Take notes on your life. Copy passages out of books and write down memorable lines your friends say.
Good writers write frequently. Write letters with whole sentences and paragraphs. Write poetry, essays, reading and field notes, personal experiences, and detailed descriptions of things you know well. Get a bunch of active email relationships going and write often. Write, write, write.
To write well in sociology, we need to learn the skills of story tellers and great teachers in all fields. And we are all obliged to learn them on our own. Therefore, we need to study writing on our own. Buy and regularly reread The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Successful professional writers are always learning more about their craft, even when they are only relearning what they once knew and forgot.
The first principle of good writing is: Write clearly. You want to make it easy for a reader to understand what you are saying. Make your message your most important priority and get out of the reader's way. Use many short sentences, vary the length of sentences in a paragraph, and use fancy words sparingly. To some extent, the writer needs to disappear. By writing clearly, we help the reader accept that what we say is true. Science is in part a rhetorical strategy.
The second principle of good writing is: Write in the active voice. Or, write in the passive voice and then methodically edit yourself back into the active voice.
Sociologists tend to focus on forces and trends while neglecting to mention (or even think about) the living, breathing, human actors. For example: "The pattern was created," "the policy was changed," and "Ford Motor Company was sued." All three statements leave wide open who did the establishing, changing, and suing. Writing in the active voice requires that we make the actors explicit. Instead, say: "The Beatles created the pattern," "Eleanor Roosevelt changed the policy," and "the relatives of people who died in flaming Pintos sued Ford Motor Company." If we can not say clearly who the actors are, we probably need more information.
The third principle of good writing is: Organize your paper well. When I was a graduate student, a successful grant writer hired me to help write a proposal. His only advice was: "just make sure to use lots of A's and B's and C's and 1's and 2's and 3's." He meant that a proposal or article should be well organized, that topics should be grouped together in paragraphs and sections. Following his advice and improving a paper's organization usually involves moving around chunks of text. Therefore, block moves are your friend.
The fourth principle of good writing is: Give your work to several people, mainly those who write clearly. Ask them to tell you first what they liked, what persuaded them, what was good and interesting. Readers will always tell you their criticisms. Though necessary, criticism can be disheartening. Even your friends will be much slower to tell you what they liked about your writing. It is more work, make them do it. Ask them for specific examples of things you did well. Restate for them in your own words what they say. Be a glutton for knowledgeable praise. Try to produce what your readers like. Push your readers to suggest alternate wordings and specific solutions to the problems they find. And take their editorial suggestions seriously. If two readers you trust find a sentence, paragraph or section confusing, change it -- even if you think it's the finest thing you ever wrote.
Good writing comes from rewriting. I usually write at least four to six drafts of anything more important than a letter, and sometimes I do that for letters. Much rewriting means even more rereading, looking again and again for the unnecessary and inadequate words, phrases, and sentences. Mark Twain once said "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
The fifth principle of good writing is: Edit other people's work. This is, in fact, the only way to become competent at editing your own work. It is much easier to see the problems in other peoples' writings. So edit their work. Break up their sentences. Cut their redundancies, rearrange their paragraphs, rewrite their sentences into the active voice, offer them alternate wordings, ask them to expand underdeveloped points. In the long run, the editing you generously provide for others will be the among the most self-serving things you've ever done.
Writing is solitary work. Writers spend a lot of time alone, looking at pieces of paper and computer screens, talking to themselves. By editing other people's work, writing for people we know, learning what smart readers like and incorporating their suggestions, we make the work less solitary and much better.
2. Writing up Research: Telling Stories with Good Data
Our job as sociologists, scholars, writers, and teachers, is to tell stories. Never forget that, never doubt that, and never accept any interpretation of your job that does not include that. You are a story teller who tells true stories.
To tell good stories we need data, usually good data, and if possible great data. The better the data, the better the story can be. Data come in all forms -- numbers, pictures, words, recordings, artifacts, pixels, whatever. Contrary to what many graduate students and sociologists think, for young academics trying to write for publication, data will get you through times of no theory better than theory will get you through times of no data.
To get good data, we have to do research. We have to go out, get data, bring it home, and work with it. Fortunately, graduate schools of sociology can and sometimes do teach basic research skills, though research shops often do it better. For most research projects, curiosity, persistence, good luck, and some resources matter most.
To tell good stories with data, we must figure out what we have learned and what we want to say. This requires thinking. Most of the time, so-called writer's block is actually a case of thinker's block. Sometimes so-called writer's block is caused by a lack of data and we must think in order to realize that. If you find yourself stuck when writing, take it as a sign that you need to think more about what you are trying say, and that you may also need more information. Using thought and data, we have to find stories to tell.
Everyone does some thinking at the keyboard or writing pad. However, many intellectual and writing problems are best solved away from the keyboard. Pacing, walking, showering, biking, driving, reading, listening to music, or just leaning against a wall can stimulate thinking and writing for some people sometimes. Conversation with clever friends and colleagues can also help a lot. And some writers only figure out what they think in the course of writing. Rewriting is even more crucial for them.
Find model work. Study books and articles that are like the work you want to do. If we can't find good examples of the kind of research and writing that we want to do, we probably can't do it.
Read (or at least periodically check out) top-notch intellectual journals. A serious sociologist is a real intellectual, someone who plays creatively with ideas and language. Therefore, read the best intellectuals writing today. Study and imitate them. Buy their books, or take them home from the library, even if you don't read everything you get. All good intellectuals do that. To be a competent intellectual also means learning the history of what we study. The more we know about the history of our topic, and of writing on it in any field, the better our work will be.
When writing a paper, I recommend starting with the specific, with data, with a story, and then generalizing from it at the end. Use theory to explain the data. Tell data-driven and theoretically-informed stories. After telling our tale, if we so desire, we can step out from behind the curtain and explain what we were doing. Unlike historians, sociologists have tended to do the opposite -- to start with a generalization or hypothesis. I think sociologists have much to learn from historians about story telling.
Make an argument; an argument is a story. A paper should make one or two important points and some supporting points. A paper should report some true things and make a case for something. Theory is a story told at a somewhat higher level of abstraction, but a story nonetheless. If something can't be told as a story, it doesn't make sense. And, if something doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense. Don't be awed by nonsense no matter who says it. Ask the same questions of your own work and anyone else's: what's the point? what's the argument? what's the story?
Develop relationships with other people who are studying some of the same general topics as you. Read their writings, develop email conversations with them, talk to them on the phone. Try to make some of them your friends. Here in the twenty-first century, we have the possibility of regular working relationships, and even intimate friendships, with people we rarely see. Do it.
It can be fun and productive to do research and write with another person. Two people together can be smarter than one, and a paper written by two people can be better than either one could do alone. But collaborating with another person is not less work. A good article written by two people takes at least twice as long as an article written by one person. There are no short cuts.
To do good sociology we often have to know two fields. To do good historical sociology, I have to know sociology and history. Expertise in two or more fields is necessary for many kinds of research projects and areas of study. It requires more work to have real depth in two fields, but the personal, intellectual, and professional payoffs are substantial.
3. Being a Sociologist
My old friend Jerry Himmelstein wrote an undergraduate thesis in his senior year at Columbia. Jerry worked extremely hard all year. In the last few weeks he slaved night and day to complete the project. Collapsing across the finish line, he brought the thesis to his professor's office. His mentor took the large manuscript, thumbed through it briefly, and said:
"Nice job Himmelstein -- you're going to graduate school in sociology aren't you?"
"Yes, I am," answered Jerry proudly.
"Well," said the professor, "if you work very hard, and if you are very good, you get do this for the rest of your life."
Why would anyone want to do that?
I'm happy being a sociologist for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most of all for the largely unalienated labor. I like teaching and I am now pretty good at it. But I've been hired, paid, and promoted for learning things and writing some of what I've learned. The writing is still difficult, but the learning is fantastic. As a sociologist I get to learn almost anything I want.
One of the best things about being a sociologist is that we can go anywhere, see anything, read anything, talk to anyone, and we can always say we are doing fieldwork. And we may well be. No one knows what will be useful in our writing and teaching -- and we certainly don't. When you are a sociologist, as Edward Brecher once said, the damnedest things are tax deductible.
Our job as sociologists is to learn true things about the social world and to write about them. Much of the time, perhaps most of the time, we can be neither neutral nor disinterested. But we can be honest and truthful about what we find. The actual existing world of human beings is hardly ever the way anyone would like it to be. People's actions, words and creations are frequently surprising, and even peculiar, strange, or bizarre. Our task as sociologists is to describe some part of that world as clearly and truthfully as we can. If you do not believe that there are important true things to say about the social world and what people do, then you are in the wrong field. Consider a career in philosophy, law or economics.
Sociology is a science. It is not a purely positivist science on the model of physics. But it does make use of many of the logical and empirical tools of the physical sciences. All sciences, including sociology, seek to systematically describe and understand the world. But sociology is also an art form -- among many other reasons because it is a variety of literature. (Robert Nisbet has a good discussion of this in his book, Sociology as an Art Form).
In Invitation to Sociology: A Humanist Perspective, Peter Berger says that sociology is not defined by what it studies, nor by the theories or methods it uses. He says that sociology is distinguished by its perspectives, especially its mistrust of the taken for granted. Berger offers what he calls "the first wisdom of sociology." The idea that an academic field has a "first wisdom" is bold and clever. Berger's first wisdom of sociology is: things are not as they seem to be. I like that conception very much.
Berger identifies four motifs that he finds central in sociological writing. He calls these debunking (unmasking, revealing the truth about something), unrespectability (looking at the world from the perspective of the unrespectables, the underdogs), relativizing (understanding that almost everything depends on context), and cosmopolitanism (an appreciation for the city and human diversity). I love being in a field with those values, those motifs. All are important, but I think the first is the most important. Following Berger, I suggest that good sociologists are good story tellers who show that things are not as they seem to be.
I am a C. Wright Millsian. I believe that making sense of the world is fascinating and useful work. I love figuring out the world, and I require the big picture to orient myself. I routinely understand who I am, what I want, and what I feel in terms of the intersection of history and biography. I understand my own life by viewing it in political, economic, cultural, institutional and historical context. I believe that the sociological imagination can truly help people -- collectively and individually -- to improve their lives, to be happier, saner, and more effective at whatever they do. I believe that more strongly now than ever.
4. Good Writing as a Sociological Tradition
For C. Wright Mills, writing well was central to the task of making sense of the social world. For Mills, among the important qualities that made his heros -- Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, W. E. H. Lecky, Jackob Burckhardt, W.E. B. DuBois, Robert Park, Karl Manheim, Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen -- great was that they were all good writers or very good writers. Most of the good or just widely read sociologists of the generation or two before me, of all political persuasions and sociological perspectives, thought of themselves as writers and worked hard to write well. Certainly some sociologists, from Talcott Parson to Harold Garfinkle and on, have written dense, plodding, jargon-filled prose. But good writing has also always been a major tradition within sociology. For example, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, along with C. Wright Mills and Peter Berger, among others there were:
Robert Lynd, Helen Lynd, Lewis Coser, Rose Coser, Phillip Slater, Alice Rossi, David Reisman, Everett Hughes, Helen Hughes, Howard Becker, Robert Merton, Louis Wirth, Mirra Komarovsky, Alvin Gouldner, Paul Cressy, Oliver Cox, Alfred Lindesmith, Seymour Lipset, William F. White, Dennis Wrong, Jessie Bernard, Nathan Glazer, Elliot Liebow, Ralph Miliband, Vance Packard, Robert Nisbet, Erving Goffman, Norbert Elias, Betty Friedan, Michel Foucault, Irving Zeitlin, Eric Fromm, Phillip Reiff, Ralph Daherndorf, Herbert Blumer, Arthur J. Vidich, Joseph Bensman, Ned Polsky, Ernst Becker, Robin Williams, E. Digby Baltzell, Joseph Gusfield, John Seeley, Raymond Aron, William Domhoff, David Matza, Robert Blauner, Kingsley Davis, Reinhard Bendix, Herbert Gans, Daniel Bell, and Kai Erickson.During the same period, most of the very good anthropologists, historians, political scientists, geographers, linguists, and philosophers were also skillful writers. Their important works endure and remain important to students and scholars in part because they are usually well written at the level of the sentence and the paragraph. Many social scientists have come along since who are good and successful because they have something important to say and they say it well. Learn from their work and example. In the end, the two professional tasks -- making sense of some part of the social work and writing about it skillfully -- are one.
Harry G. Levine, Department of Sociology, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Flushing, New York, 11367. email: HGLevine@compuserve.com