What's here?
Well, a few things. First, there are two sets of documents, both of concern to my undergraudate and graduate advisees. The first is a few tips and thoughts on how to improve writing. It is angled towards students in my courses who tell me that they really don't know what's expected of them in a sociology paper. It's not a definitive answer to that question, but it is a piece of that puzzle.
The second is a set of documents that were useful in guiding graduate students through the process of writing and sending off an empirical paper. As I've been working with undergraduate thesis students, this will eventually be a sort of start-to-finish primer of sociological research. For now, it's a smaller set of scalable ideas.
How to improve your writing
Writing is, in the social sciences, a way to communicate an argument and to convince others that you have something useful to say. There is no great distinction in my mind between good argument and good writing. Good writing can be artful, but it at minimum is clear, precise, and logical. It is a critical, but it is largely a poorly taught skill.
To aid in this process, I would like to present some writing guidelines I have come to appreciate over the years. Some are filched from colleagues, others are distillations of experience gathered from papers I’ve graded, these papers very much included.
Format
- Staple your papers, rather than clipping them, taping them, or folding them over. Also, number your pages.
- Normal sized font, normal sized spacing, normal sized margins, black type. It is preferable in all but the most extreme cases (ie when page limits are enforced with zeal) to have papers be readable rather than fitting the exact paper length specifications. Professors always know when a paper is ‘thin.’ If that’s the case do not make it worse with 14 point font or 2” margins.
Substance
- State a thesis and prove it. I cannot overstate this. The difference between a description and an analysis is that the former has no argument. “Sociologists have argued that gender is more construction than biology,” is going to lead you to less useful places than “The construction of gender transforms average differences between people into categorical differences, and it works best when these practices are treated as ‘natural.’” In the second case, I know what you think, and I understand how the readings can support or undermine this argument.
- Each paragraph should have a distinct purpose that advances your argument. Look at each paragraph, and be able to answer for yourself “what is this doing here?” If the answer is “not much,” or “demonstrating that I’ve done the reading,” or “setting the stage for the next paragraph,” consider editing it.
- Readings are evidence and data for your arguments, and they do not speak for themselves. When you start a paragraph with “Connell says”, it is an indicator that your argument is being subordinated to the evidence. And that is almost never a good idea.
- Think of the readings the way a prosecutor in a murder trial might think of evidence. She would not walk up to the jury, point, and say “body, knife, insurance payout.” She would tell a story (that is, make an argument) that weaves together evidence – and as you might guess, the defense lawyer would tell a very different story with the same evidence. You are the lawyer. Readings and films are evidence.
Style
- Argue in the active voice rather than the passive voice, though passives are not inappropriate. E.g., “gender is shaped by society” does not tell the real story. It is too vague, and too passive. On the other hand, “teachers, parents, and the medical profession maintain rigid gender categories” tells who you are talking about, what you are talking about, and what the shape of the argument to come will look like. Passives are not bad as such, but often they mask the fact that you have not yet decided what is causal about your argument. Passives are an easy way not to have to make hard decisions. Avoid this.
- Delete the warm-up paragraph. Introductions so often begin for students on the second page, after you have rhetorically set the stage. This is not bad, but you should really consider deleting the warm-up before turning in the paper. I can not tell you how often a students 2nd paragraph, or last paragraph is actually the opening paragraph. You have been (poorly) taught to reserve your conclusions for the end, in order to achieve a ‘tada’ moment (‘I will discuss three interesting things in this paper’ at the outset; ‘In this paper, I discussed how gender works, why the medical establishment is mostly responsible, and what we should do about it’ at the end). Truly, it works better when you tell up front what you are going to argue, specifically.
Finally
- Spell-check. This does not mean look for the red squiggly line in MS Word. It means read the paper through, and fix the mistakes. A student of mine noted in a paper that ‘gender is defined by a person’s gentiles.’ This is an argument of a different sort than the one they wanted to make. Many confuse ‘effect’ (noun) with ‘affect’ (verb). ‘Its’ is a possessive, ‘it’s’ is a conjunction meaning ‘it is.’ Spell checkers are stupid and rote. Read your paper.
And now, the best advice I can give you
- The paper you turn in should be a paper, not a draft of a paper. The paper you write two days early, or at 11pm the night before class (or 4am, or 8:59am the morning of class) is not a paper. It is a draft. If you learn nothing else about writing in college, learn that drafts are meant to be revised. People who write perfect first drafts are so incredibly rare that we can write them off as psychotic aberrations. Students who say that
they can write ‘fast’ once they sit down to write are wrong. So are those who ‘get it right in their head’ before writing it down, like Mozart channeling the lord’s music. No. No. No. Write a draft. Revise it. Revise it again. Ideally, you should turn in a 3rd draft, or thereabouts. At minimum a 2nd draft. Not a 1st draft. First drafts mostly suck (this is true at all levels of professionalism, in virtually every single area).
How to 'do' sociology
An evolving primer on conducting sociological research. This is the result of my first attempt to teach seniors at Barnard how to conceive and write a senior thesis.
There are five parts to the 'primer,' which can be found under the headings (all are .pdf files):