Writing for Social Scientists: How to
Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book,
or Article: Second Edition (Chicago
Guides to Writing, Editing, and
Publishing) by Howard S. Becker
Becker On Writing
Students and researchers all write under pressure, and those pressures—
most lamentably, the desire to impress your audience rather than to
communicate with them—often lead to pretentious prose, academic
posturing, and, not infrequently, writer’s block.
Sociologist Howard S. Becker has written the classic book on how to
conquer these pressures and simply write. First published nearly twenty
years ago, Writing for Social Scientists has become a lifesaver for writers
in all fields, from beginning students to published authors. Becker’s
message is clear: in order to learn how to write, take a deep breath and
then begin writing. Revise. Repeat.
It is not always an easy process, as Becker wryly relates. Decades of
teaching, researching, and writing have given him plenty of material, and
Becker neatly exposes the foibles of academia and its “publish or perish”
atmosphere. Wordiness, the passive voice, inserting a “the way in which”
when a simple “how” will do—all these mechanisms are a part of the social
structure of academic writing. By shrugging off such impediments—or at
the very least, putting them aside for a few hours—we can reform our work
habits and start writing lucidly without worrying about grades, peer
approval, or the “literature.”

In this new edition, Becker takes account of major changes in the
computer tools available to writers today, and also substantially expands
his analysis of how academic institutions create problems for them. As
competition in academia grows increasingly heated, Writing for Social
Scientists will provide solace to a new generation of frazzled, would-be
writers.
Personal Review: Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and
Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article: Second Edition (Chicago
Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) by Howard S. Becker
Howard S. Becker, the author of "Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start
and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article", is a social scientist. Of course,
no respectable scientist, social or non-social, would dare generalizing to
other fields of knowledge the findings laboriously made in his own field. So,
Becker conservatively addresses his book just to "social scientists". Writing
is, however, an essential aptitude for any scientist. In fact, it is no less
crucial to the survival of the scientist, as a scientist, than his or her own
aptitudes to read or think logically. So, what Becker writes in his book is
just as important to social scientists as it is to any other kind of scientist.
Quite paradoxically, most scientists initiate and develop their scientific
careers without devoting a single minute of their time to specifically
learning how to write. Anyone would agree that it is impossible to play
good tennis without proper training, and whoever wished to become a
professional tennis player by just playing along would very likely be
regarded as downright naive. This is, however, what most scientists do
when it comes to writing. Becker's book does not fall in the category of the
so called "how-to" books. It is, rather, a personal reflection written in a very
entertaining and conversational style by an academic who addresses his
fellow academics, not from the top of a pulpit, but from the cultural
standpoint of the beliefs, traditions, aspirations and rites of their common
academic life. It covers, in this way, a remarkably diverse collection of
central aspects of scientific writing, such as the crucial role of editing and
rewriting (and rewriting, and rewriting), the fear of scorn, the encounters
with writer's block, or the urge to produce pompous and obscure texts. As
the book progresses, the readers notice that they are being faced with the
main fallacies of traditional scientific writing and that they are being helped
to build their own opinion on how these fallacies can be properly handled.
One such fallacy resides in the belief that there is only one right way of
putting things down on paper. In fact, most less experienced writers tend to
believe that to write well is to get the text right the first time. So, they
stumble in the beginning of their text, unsuccessfully trying to work out the
best beginning (and believing that, if they don't, they will not be able to
proceed). Often, they also stumble when trying in vain to get the best plan
for their text. Indeed, they seem to ignore that a significant part of our
knowledge is built through experimentation, and that experimentation

begins inside our own minds, as we tentatively combine ideas and try to
make sense out of them.
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