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“I have what I think is a sociology question for you,” a friend of mine in the administration recently said. Turned out to be a good one: “Why do organizations act so stupidly sometimes?”

“What prompted this question,” my friend went on, “is an email discussion with a friend [who lives in NC] about the controversy over the UNC rape allegation and the response of UNC [declaring the woman may have violated the school’s honor code]. On its face—and one must acknowledge that we don’t know all the facts—it appears that UNC is acting really stupidly. Really: accuse a possible rape victim of violating the honor code? What century do they live in?” 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...

With a high school senior in the house and the Facebook everywhere, there’s no way I could resist this great little piece from the Social Media Collective. Bonus points for layering in two of my current favorite sociological concepts: diversity and homophily. Give it a read and let me know what you think—especially you high school seniors and college freshmen out there.

(Thanks to Karl Bakeman @wwnsoc for the heads-up on this one !)

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...

A Few Things I’ve Learned

In academic writing, inscrutability is often treated as a virtue. I have a few theories:

1. “Smarter than thou.” Ever been at a talk where someone asks a “question” that’s just a transparent way to prove that they know a lot? And that they know big words, too? It’s annoying. For writers, the logic often seems: if the piece technically makes sense, but no one else can make sense of it, you must be the smartest person in the journal. You may be revered for your brilliance, but no one’s going to actually talk about your work. Readers will be too afraid to admit they don’t understand it (and too unsure about whether you do).
2. Tone-deafness. This might, more kindly, be called the expertise problem. In essence, you, the author, know this stuff backward and forward. You may start assuming everyone else does, too. Alternatively, you’ve simply read it all so many times you can no longer see the gaps in your logic or spot places that just plain don’t make sense.
3. Longer is better. In trying to cover all the bases, you go too far, accidentally creating 5th base and a watering hole somewhere in left field. Looking for a thorough lit. review, an overview of the thinking in the field, and presenting many opportunities for future researchers, you find yourself at 25 pages, when your point could have been made—and made well—in 10.

As an editor and sometime “translator” of ivory-tower-talk, I also have a few suggestions: more...

Criminal Activity

As mentioned over on Public Criminology, things are really coming together on the second of our TSP books for W.W. Norton (the first, The Social Side of Politics, is in production now). This means we’ve been immersed in all kinds of fascinating pieces on trends in and understandings of crime and punishment. Many of the pieces have already come out  (including a new Roundtable on international criminal justice published this week), but we’ve got a lot in the hopper yet. While you await that goodness—and we work furiously to get it produced—why not check out everything else we’ve done this week? more...

It used to be that almost no one worried about the transition from adolescence to adulthood; as the teenage years wrapped up, it was assumed by scholars, policy makers, parents, pundits, and  young folks themselves that they’d finish their schooling and get a job, find a mate, buy a home, and have kids. Once all of these milestones were passed, they’d fairly quickly settle into the regular, routinized world of adult life. Whatever the other limits of this halcyon and harmonious view, one thing is now clear: a swift, smooth transition to adulthood can’t be taken for granted.

Beginning in the last quarter of the 20^th century and now into the new millennium, social scientists from a wide range of fields have documented that the transition to adulthood has become more complicated, multifaceted, and extended. Scholars now see coming-of-age and transitioning into adulthood as a new, distinctive phase in the lifecourse. Indeed, we academics have coined new terms for the period—“emerging adulthood” in the psychological parlance, or “young adulthood” or “early adulthood” for those more sociologically inclined.

How should we understand this new, more extended, and uncertain transition period? What are the forces driving these changes? And what can we or should we do about the fact that it is taking young people longer and longer to make the transitions and assume the role we have so long associated with adulthood? more...

Double. Am I in trouble?

Scheduling strikes again! But the great news for you, dear readers, is that, while I’ve been immersed in creating our first volumes to publish with W.W. Norton, our authors, bloggers, and volunteer grad board members have continued to put out exciting new pieces on The Society Pages. Here’s what they’ve been doing in the past couple of weeks! more...

Abortion, sex, and marriage. Not my topics of choice, at least not professionally or publicly. Yet with the anniversary of Roe v. Wade upon us, there’s a lot of interesting talk about them lately, especially the former. One of the most thought-provoking pieces I’ve seen was published recently on Slate. It says the rise of single motherhood–40% of children are now born to women who are not married–is a byproduct of the antiabortion movement.

The argument, which comes from law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, is a bit more complicated than you might think, because it doesn’t hold for everyone all across the board. For example, it doesn’t apply for richer, older, and more educated women whose willingness to “accept abortion” has actually helped “create more stable families,” because these women delay childbearing until the right man comes along or they get comfortable with going it alone. Rather, it is focused mainly on younger, less privileged women. Basically, the argument is that the hardening of anti-abortion attitudes has led adult parents, especially Christian conservatives, to become more accepting of their daughters having children, even out of wedlock. Indeed, many of these families apparently reference their Christianity explicitly. This is what Cahn and Carbone call the “Bristol Palin Effect,” and it grabs headlines. The implication seems to be that these young women and their parents are “choosing” a principled anti-abortion stance over traditional family values.

I don’t know how good Cahn and Carbone’s numbers are (they do cite several sociologists), or even if their analysis is really borne out by the empirical data on all of the other factors that obviously contribute to the rise of the “non-marital birth rate” (the welfare state, moral decay, increasing independence of women, etc.). The implied ironies, though, are delicious: not only has the anti-abortion movement made conservatives more accepting of single motherhood, it has made liberals more likely to embrace the more traditional, two-parent family model. Cahn and Carbone, who have a book coming out from Oxford University Press, talk about it as the difference between “red” families and “blue families” (that’s the title of their forthcoming book, actually). Only in America.

This brings me back to changing attitudes about sex, sexuality, and premarital sex–are our views of sexuality more open? Is premarital sex more accepted or simply more taken for granted now? I also think of the curious new coalitions that seem to be emerging with the push for gay marriage recognition and legalization (on this score, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/us/in-shift-blankenhorn-forges-a-pro-marriage-coalition-for-all.html?hp&_r=0). And how does gender play into the picture? I guess it seems to me that this new “approach” lets the fathers of these soon-to-be-born babies, pretty much off the hook, and I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. I’m not really pushing for shotgun weddings, but at least they were based in a recognition of the complicity of a partner and didn’t just leave young moms on their own. Perhaps that’s a little strong, though to be honest, I’m not sure if it is because I’m being too much of a liberal or too much of a conservative in thinking such thoughts.