Writing & Editing

Getting sociological research into public circulation is an ongoing challenge, especially when we are talking about sociologists writing in their own voice about their own original research. Obviously, we here at TSP see that as one of our primary missions, as does our fabulous partner, ASA’s Contexts magazine. But our resources and media penetration are extremely limited. Over the past few weeks, in fact, I’ve had several conversations with colleagues and students about how few venues exist wherein sociologists can reach a public audience in their own, original voice. Even our colleagues that contribute regularly to national media outlets are often explicitly and unceremoniously instructed not to write about their own research and findings.

Against this backdrop, it seemed almost magical when Elijah Anderson’s piece analyzing Donald Trump’s rhetoric about African Americans and inner-city neighborhoods popped into my feed a week or two back. The piece appeared on Vox under the title “The Sociological Theory that Explains Trump’s Assumption that All Black Citizens Live in the ‘Inner City’.” It is, of course, Anderson’s theories that we are talking about — or, rather, that he himself is sharing with a larger public audience.

Anderson’s jumping off point is the exchange that took place during the second presidential debate when Donald Trump responded to a question from a well-dressed African American man by launching into a riff on how terrible inner-cities are, assuming and implying that this man had come from a St. Louis ghetto. Essentially Anderson analyzes that moment as a way to explain how and why African Americans are so often profiled by other Americans and he does so through a larger discussion of his own theories and research on white spaces, black spaces, and the cosmopolitan canopy.

If you already know Anderson’s work, this will be a bit of a refresher course. If you don’t, it will be a nice introduction and primer to his ideas, which have been fairly widely discussed within the field (especially the notion of the cosmopolitan canopy). And either way, I think it is a rare and important treat to see a leading sociologist writing in their own voice and showing how their research and theories can be used for a broad, mainstream public audience.

Kudos to Professor Anderson, and kudos to Vox for providing such a format and opportunity.

There’s been a lot of talk among sociologists lately about the status of ethnographic research and knowledge, and writing has been at the center of it. Does well-written, powerfully argued fieldwork enhance our sociological understanding of others and the world around us, or is a powerful narrative something ethnographers use to draw readers in and convince them of the veracity of claims that may lack strong supporting data or careful engagement with existing literature and social theory?

I think this larger debate is important context for Matthew Desmond’s argument–offered in the conclusion of Evicted, and highlighted recently at the Sociological Imagination blog–against first person narrative in the presentation of ethnographically driven social science. In Desmond’s view, this approach fails to “capture the essence of a social world” because “the ‘I’ filters all.” He explains:  I wanted my readers to know and thus be able to assess my research and its various findings, interpretations, and claims. 

“With first-person narration, the subjects and the author are each always held in view, resulting in every observation being trailed by a reaction to the observer. No matter how much care the author takes, the first-person ethnography becomes just as much about the fieldworker as about anything she or he saw.”

“At a time of rampant inequality and widespread hardship, when hunger and homelessness are found throughout America, I am interested in a different, more urgent conversation. ‘I’ don’t matter.”

I really respect Desmond and his book (not to mention his writing chops, of which I am embarrassingly jealous–I mean, I really love that “I filters all” line). And I completely agree that sociological research should not be about the researcher, if only because we sociologists tend to insist that no one is really that special or unique in the modern world. (For years I’ve joked about writing a memoir entitled “It’s Not About Me.”)

However–there it is, you knew it was coming–I am not entirely comfortable with eliminating first-person perspective from all sociological writing, ethnographic or otherwise. In fact, sometimes I believe it is appropriate and even necessary for social scientists to write this way. At least, that’s what I argued in the conclusion of my new book on Midnight Basketball–a book that has a good bit of fieldwork in it and that I decided, against many of my other impulses and principles, to write in the first person.  Given the complexity of the social worlds we live in, as well as the wide array of sociological approaches to analyzing and understanding these worlds, I think having a diversity of narrative devices is something worth preserving. 

I did this partly to construct something of a narrative thread–the thread of my discoveries and idiosyncratic insights–for a potentially dry historical narrative/case study. More importantly, though, I took this approach because I wanted to “openly acknowledge, if not highlight, the constructed nature of the narrative and research process.” I wanted my readers to know and thus be able to assess my research and its various findings, interpretations, and claims. In other words, as I put it in the end,

“I think the more we know about the research process–what data is collected and how it is collected, the manner in which it is analyzed and interpreted–the more I am able to understand and assess the relative strength and power of the claims and findings that are offered.”

That doesn’t mean Desmond is completely wrong, or that I would write every book or article the way I did my midnight basketball book. But it is to say that there are many different reasons for writing in the voices and rhetorical styles that we social scientists do, and that, given the complexity of the social worlds we live in, as well as the wide array of sociological approaches to analyzing and understanding these worlds, I think having a diversity of narrative devices in our tool kit is something worth preserving.

When the news came from Ferguson on November 24th, it was hard to know what to do. Every sociologist and criminologist possesses some pertinent expertise, whether we study violence, law, race, or criminal justice and injustice. But how and when should we engage? The streets were alive with protesters, police officers, and journalists. The President was calling for calm, which was itself a polarizing message. And Facebook feeds flowed with horrifying videos, rage, and invective, as many were “defriending” and “unfollowing” one another until their social networks were fully purged or converted.

Public scholars can and should step up in such highly-charged political moments, but there was little room to maneuver in those first few days. A dispassionate rendering of cold social facts – on the legal intricacies of grand jury indictment, for example – would ring hollow to those who saw the events in clear moral terms. A straightforward presentation of a pertinent research study – on the effectiveness of police body cameras, for example – would redirect energy and attention away from larger questions. And, to the extent we could actually penetrate the teeming information space, our statements would be reduced to 140-character factoids and channeled to those predisposed to agree with us already. How can we do good public work under such conditions?

In the tense days and nights after the indictment announcements, sociologists such as Michael Eric Dyson and Doug Hartmann made insightful big-picture contributions. Some of us wrote op-eds or gave interviews, others spoke at demonstrations or held teach-ins, and many more revamped our regular teaching and research activities. Like many of you, I found myself in several community forums, most recently with a sitting judge and a television reporter who would moderate our discussion. The talk had been scheduled for months as a wonky “nuts and bolts of justice reform” discussion, but the sudden surge of interest in crime and punishment reshaped our agenda. It would have been foolish, if not impossible, to ignore the protests and issues occurring right outside the door. Interest was high. We moved the event to a larger hall when we reached capacity and we recorded the proceedings for later broadcast. As I looked around the racially and socially diverse crowd of journalists, students, lawyers, teachers, police officers, formerly incarcerated people, and community members, I knew that dozens if not hundreds of my colleagues were similarly engaged in their communities. I claim no special expertise on these topics or events, but I share these personal reflections and suggestions in hopes of encouraging other section members who might wish to engage the public.

Position and Language

When speaking with a public audience, I try to remember that there are other experts in the room. For example, a middle-aged white guy like me has little authority or legitimacy regarding the subjective experience of interacting with police as a young African American in the central city. Put simply, many in attendance did not want or need me to lecture to them about how their communities are policed. So my job was to give due attention to race and justice while also acknowledging the real limits of my perspective and the research evidence I would cite. Thinking a personal story might help, I opened by acknowledging the #BlackLivesMatter and #CrimingWhileWhite campaigns and briefly noting my own juvenile arrests – and how the “judicious and humane discretion” of three Minnesota police officers was so important in my life that I thanked them by name in my dissertation acknowledgements. After repeated exposure to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner videos, few in the audience would have argued that men of color have been getting the same breaks that I received. As importantly, few would have argued against providing the same sort of breaks to all young people. Yet framing the issue in this way also helped make such points without bashing or demonizing those police officers – several of them my former students — who showed up at the forum.

This was not the night for a PowerPoint presentation, as personal stories are often more effective than statistics in helping audiences evaluate and reframe their image of crime and justice. I also called out Emily Baxter’s WeAreAllCriminals.com. Using evocative images and personal accounts, WAAC shows the blurriness of the criminal/non-criminal distinction. Terminology plays a similar role in public scholarship, where the wrong descriptor can quickly alienate half the audience. I try to use simple, neutral language to facilitate discussion, addressing people formally (e.g., as Ms. Johnson or Judge Castro, rather than as Angie or Lenny). In such forums, identifiers such as “police officer” or “formerly incarcerated” are more helpful and precise than terms like “cop” and “offender.”

Content and Context

Academics sometimes try to teach a whole semester’s worth of material in an hour, which dramatically exceeds anyone’s ability to process new information. I try to identify three to five key points and to make sure that they are well-supported in the literature. That is, that they are “near-consensus” areas in our field that the public might not yet appreciate. That night, I called out: (1) Tom Tyler’s work on procedural justice, and how treating people with dignity and respect engenders greater trust and legitimacy, regardless of the outcome of a citizen’s encounter with the criminal justice system; (2) social-psychological research on implicit bias, which shows that the great majority of Americans, including police officers and professors, hold unconscious group-based biases that affect our behavior; (3) a few well-chosen statistics on the basic race-specific rates of arrest and incarceration in our community; and, (4) the proportion of these arrests that are for low-level offenses that rarely result in prosecution or conviction. Local evidence is critical because the audience is far more engaged in practices close to home (and more likely to dismiss or discount bad things that happen elsewhere). Public criminology can also provide an important myth-busting function in such cases. For me, this meant calling out states like Minnesota and Wisconsin for having the nation’s worst racial disparities in correctional populations – a difficult but essential truth for the audience to grasp. Context is also important for drawing local, national, and international comparisons. For example, I explained how my home state was admirably stingy with prison beds, but profligate in putting people on very long probation terms.

Hope and Questions

Public events, to a far greater extent than academic talks, should leave the audience with a sense of efficacy, or at least hope for real change. I made sure to note that after four decades of rising incarceration, that criminal punishment had finally begun a modest decline. And, of course, that our community and the nation had enjoyed a 50 percent crime drop over the past two decades. To put this drop in perspective, I explained how this meant a decline from 100 Minneapolis murders in 1995 to about 40 the past few years. Nationally, I pointed to bipartisan reform efforts such as the REDEEM Act, cosponsored by Senators Corey Booker and Rand Paul. Locally, I identified bipartisan reforms such as the new Minnesota expungement law and a new ban-the-box provision that bars organizations from asking about criminal records on job applications, but permits them to inquire at the interview stage. I also tackled issues in my own area of research expertise, including local challenges to felon disenfranchisement and the broader problem of “piling on” so many collateral sanctions that they become criminogenic. In particular, I described recent testimony on behalf of six “model probationers,” who were hauled into court and charged with new felonies because they had voted while still “on paper.” A broad coalition was assembling to challenge the voting ban (including the district attorney charged who prosecuted those cases) and several audience members approached me after the event to ask how they could get involved. Finally, I spoke about the costs of diminished trust in the criminal justice system, including Todd Clear and Natasha Frost’s argument that the discretion to make back-end sentencing adjustments can help curb excess or gratuitous punishment – even, or especially, for those serving long sentences for violent crimes.

Public events work best when audience members have a chance to engage the speakers, and we received an impressive range of audience questions that evening. When asked about the prospects for a new social movement around criminal justice reform, I could applaud the efforts of students — and the members of this section — to shine a brighter light on crime, law, and justice in the contemporary United States. As a medical school colleague is fond of saying, sunshine can be a marvelous disinfectant. So too can public criminology.

For further reading, see Doug Hartmann’s Ferguson, the Morning After; Insights on Crime and Punishment from a Judge and a Sociologist, and Public Criminologies (with Michelle Inderbitzin).

Reprinted from Crime, Law & Deviance News, FALL/WINTER 2014 -2015.
Newsletter for the Crime, Law & Deviance section of the American Sociological Association

Last week I danced in my first flash mob, saw a powerful set of storytellers at a live Life of the Law event, and pontificated on public outreach with super sharp friends from JustPublics, OpenDemocracy, and LOTL. In my #LSAMN14 session for graduate students and new professors, I offered 5 bits of advice for those eager to write for a public audience.

1. Use your expertise. Make it about your expert knowledge as a social scientist rather than your views as a citizen. Use the command and authority you’ve developed on a project to really break it down for the rest of us.

2. Don’t wait for tenure. Graduate students and assistant professors today should develop an online presence. And writing short pieces for the public can often offer accessible calling cards to your work and interests.

3. Timing matters. Don’t just react to the news by beginning a new piece. Have some ideas and drafts that you can work up quickly when the time is right. Many events are seasonal or predictable (e.g., back to school season, election season, release-of-crime-statistics season), so write now for August or December.

4. Avoid zero-sum thinking. Public work need not detract from your research. In my experience, my journal articles and public posts tend to be mutually reinforcing and complementary rather than competing substitutes for one another. Staying in touch with journalists, for example, helps me stay on top of new developments in my field. And the more you write, the easier writing becomes.

5. Use your editor! There’s a premium on brevity & clarity in public writing. My first op-eds were a sea of red ink, as sharp editors reduced both my word count and my syllable-per-word count by at least 50 percent. And, in my experience at TSP and Contexts, the most famous and highly regarded experts in the field tend to be most amenable to smart editing. They get it.

In the spirit of brevity and humility about the limits of my own expertise, I’ll close by repeating the best bit of advice I learned in school — what I’ve come to call the Wu Admonition: “Remember, Chris, that not all advice is good advice.”

Well, we’re pretty sure you can, too—no dance-offs required. Still, there are some guidelines that will help you in pitching an article idea and getting from proposal to finished product. We work hard to make sure that this is a rewarding, relatively painless process in which your words get the special treatment from our editorial staff and your graphics get spiffed up by our excellent graduate student Suzy McElrath. Here’s how to get started:

1. TSP is not a typical journal. Broadly, we want to publish big picture articles that can provide basic data and information missing from public debates, supply context to the news, or add sociological insights to the general public.
2. Jargon lover? Strip it out to the extent that you can. Again, we have an enormous and lively audience of readers, and there’s no way all million of them are sociologists. They don’t speak academic-ese, so you’ll have to try to drop it. When it’s useful, use the terminology but add a parenthetical that explains it informally.
3. Now, if you’re still feeling excited and want to get a little feedback before diving in to a full-length draft, send us the following:

• Your hook. What’s the intriguing first sentence? What’s the five-word title of true interest? We prefer titles without colons or question marks, so try to go for interest over explanation in your title. Let the paper do that work.
• Your first paragraph; we’d like an idea of what your style is and where you’re going with the piece.
• The overall point. What do you want readers to take away from the piece?
• Your recommended readings. We’d like to see 4-6 recommended readings that will help the lay reader who is interested in learning more about your topic. If it’s not behind a paywall, awesome! Eventually, we would also like a descriptive sentence that explains why each reading is particularly useful or ground-breaking.

Now you’re ready! Get that sociological imagination in gear, because open-access AND the chance to make it into a print volume is just too cool to pass up.

letta@thesocietypages.org
hartm021@umn.edu
uggen001@umn.edu

Still Wise Words

Hopefully, we all have a teacher or two who stirs fond memories. For me, one of the first to spring to mind is Loren J. Samons II, a professor of classical studies at my alma mater, Boston University. Prof. Samons is notable for many reasons (one of his brilliant strokes was to refer to the class, collectively, as “scholars”—a convention that set the tone for each lecture in just one word), but this week, I found an old syllabus. I wondered why I’d kept it—I took several classes from Prof. Samons in my time at BU, but it still seemed an odd document to cling to, some 12 years after graduation. And then I read. Nestled within many wise words for young students learning to learn, write, engage with literature, and find their way through sources both ancient and modern, was this gem: more...

Write On

In Michael Pollan’s least-heralded, but perhaps best-loved, book, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams, the author sets off to learn about architecture and building so as to create the perfect place to write. And he does! He eventually comes up with a little ship of a building, small but functional, with everything in its place and a pleasant view of his home at a nice enough remove to allow thoughts to bud and grow. How idyllic. more...

The Art of Being Edited*

A primer on getting the most out of the editing process, this short article assumes that you’re working on a journal submission, but is generally applicable to an op-ed you might be pitching, sample chapters for a book proposal, etc. I am also assuming you’ve already found an editor, but I’ll talk about that a little bit. As always, I take questions and additional recommendations—I’m positive I’ve overlooked, oh, about a hundred things. A hundred seems about right. more...

Proofreading

Typos lurk, mock, elude, persist. This Friday, I offer some quick(ish) tips for effective proofreading*:

1. Remember: proofing is a final step. This is not the time to edit, reorganize, or create new subsections. We’re past that.
2. Do not proofread your own work if at all possible. You can no longer spot errors when you already know the text. Find a buddy and exchange proofing for proofing (or pies, pen-lathing, vacuuming, etc.). If you’re an academic, try to find a non-academic proofer-friend.
3. Your proofer should read your piece quickly, as though it’s in a magazine. You don’t want this to be analyzed (see: #1, this is not editing). As with editing, most mistakes will jump out if the reader has to pause in the flow of reading.
4. If it absolutely has to be as perfect as you can make it (say, in a cover letter for a job application, book proposal, or grant application), your proofer will need to take a second pass, and this one’s the kicker. You should probably paint their house. They need to read it backwards. Yes, it sounds insane, but it works. This perspective allows a focus on just the words (that is, you can’t skim), and it’s nearly guaranteed new errors will be uncovered. When you have time to waste, try it on the last recommendation letter you asked for or wrote.

Now, on to the Roundup! Please add your proofing tips in the comments. I always need mre. More. Ugh. more...

Read Widely

In case it’s hard to tell, that’s an imperative, not a descriptor. Today I plan to use my little soapbox to trumpet some fabulous writing, while also seeking submissions to what I lovingly call “Letta’s List.”

See, many authors ask me for examples of how to incorporate a lot of information into something that’s thorough, academically sound, and engaging. It’s a tough balance, to be sure, but over the years, I’ve collected a number of books (and this is by no means a list of all of them) I can hand off as representations of that ideal. They likely have nothing to do with your area of study, but watching the authors’ deft hands at work (and knowing there are surely unsung editor elves in there, too) can be a truly enjoyable homework assignment. Think of it as authorial excellence by osmosis. Absorb and emulate. more...