Writing & Editing

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...

Good Advice

So, this week, I heard an interesting piece of advice for writers, and it’s been knocking around in my head. Here’s the thing: it’s great, pithy advice. And it’s obviously sexist. So here’s the adaptation at which I’ve grudgingly arrived: “When writing an essay, think of it like shorts. You want ’em long enough to cover the business, and short enough to keep things interesting.” more...

Professional editing is our “secret advantage” at TSP and this secret advantage has a name: Ms. Letta Page. Without her sharp-eyed and supportive editorial work, we’d be offering far less content on these pages — and what we could provide would be much sloppier and less readable. Together with web editor Jon Smajda, she’s also responsible for much of the elegant design work and illustration you see around the site.

Associate editor Letta Page usually toils anonymously in her behind the scenes role as self-described editrix and language maven. Today, however, she’s featured in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune style section. Letta’s style and positive energy shine through in her editorial work, but she’s also got killer fashion sense. Because her contemporaries are rarely so passionate about grammar, diction, and the (retro-cool) Elements of Style, she suspects that our authors tend to picture her as “the sort of editor who wears her glasses on a chain.”

Ms. Page is also passionate about intellectual property, ensuring that we don’t appropriate the work of photographers, writers, and artists without their permission. A shortened version of the article is online, but you’ll have to purchase the newsprint version of this morning’s Strib to see the full story and images.

Our authors don’t care so much about our fashion choices, of course (which is fortunate, in light of the crimes against fashion routinely perpetrated by professors Uggen and Hartmann). But they do appreciate an editor who can simultaneously sharpen their prose and bring their ideas to full flower. Great editing, like great style, never goes out of fashion.

The comedian Elon James White (who hosts the web series “This Week in Blackness,” writes for a number of venues including Slate and The Huffington Post, and undertakes a huge array of other endeavors) has started the “Have a Seat Movement” (http://haveaseatmovement.org/). The mission is simple and pretty amusing: to identify celebrities, scholars, pundits who speak out on public issues that they don’t know anything about or about which they don’t have any meaningful contribution to make… and then launch a collective campaign asking them to stand down.

This movement, according to its promotors, “crosses gender, class, race, and political lines” and “isn’t about ideology—it’s about common sense.” “When we tell someone to have a seat it doesn’t mean that they are bad people. It doesn’t mean that they are specifically malicious or evil. It means that on this particular issue that they are speaking on they need to stop speaking. They aren’t enlightening. They aren’t helping. They’re causing more harm than good and need to be told that. A seat is needed. They should take it.”

I’m definitely amused, and generally I think I’m with them. However, I do want to offer one caveat: while common-sense might offer a reasonable standard for advising people out of their element to sit down, I’m not quite sure if it provides an accurate compass or gauge for identifying those individuals and organizations who actually should speak up (especially when  issues require certain amounts of information and expertise). That seems the harder task—and a task, moreover, that sociologists could take a more active, engaged role. Indeed I like to think that that is part of what we long tried to do with Contexts and will continue to do with The Society Pages.

Maybe, while Elon James White invites folks to nominate candidates who need to sit down and clears the decks a bit, perhaps we should begin to collect the names of those who should be encouraged to stand up. Thoughts? Suggestions? Nominees?

What makes a social science blogger or blog post unique? Too often, not enough. Social scientists who only offer up their personal opinions about the daily news end up being just another voice in the crowded echo chamber. What we need are social science bloggers who can insert real knowledge and the unique perspective of their disciplines, data, and insight into the mix.

Chris Kelty makes this point (and others) in his recent post about blogging in anthropology. Kelty also offers some great tips on how social scientific bloggers can make more meaningful, substantive contributions. We especially like Kelty’s suggestion to blog about a journal article you’ve read recently:

“Think,” he writes, “how pleased you would be if someone blogged about your research… This exercise hones two valuable skills: a) the ability to communicate what an article says and why it is important better than the article does itself and b) the ability to do so in a language and tone that flatters the author, provokes your audience to [consider social science] thought, and doesn’t take you longer than a couple of hours.”

Does this sound a little like our citings posts? Hopefully so.