The Craft Of Writing In Sociology

An essential guide to constructing coherent and powerful arguments, using real examples from student work and demonstrating, step-by-step, how to read critically, write the opening paragraphs of an essay, provide evidence in the middle and construct punchy conclusions.

This book is a contribution to contemporary debates on social research with a unique focus on the relationship between methods and the crafting of knowledge. Nine experienced researchers from different disciplines have come together to explore what really matters to them in the process of doing qualitative research.

This book brings together prominent investigators to provide a comprehensive guide to doing life course research, including an “inside view” of how they designed and carried out influential longitudinal studies. Using vivid examples, the contributors trace the connections between early and later experience and reveal how researchers and graduate students can discover these links in their own research. Well-organized chapters describe the best and newest ways to: *Use surveys, life records, ethnography, and data archives to collect different types of data over years or even decades. *Apply innovative statistical methods to measure dynamic processes that result in improvement, decline, or reversibility in economic fortune, stress, health, and criminality. *Explore the micro- and macro-level explanatory factors that shape individual trajectories, including genetic and environmental interactions, personal life history, interpersonal ties, and sociocultural institutions.

From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed 100 academics worldwide about their writing background and practices and shows how they find or create the conditions to get their writing done.

The Sociology Student Writer's Manual 7/E is a practical guide to research, reading, and writing in sociology. The Sociology Student Writer’s Manual and Reader’s Guide, Seventh Edition, is a set of instructions and exercises that sequentially develop citizenship, academic, and professional skills while providing students with knowledge about a wide range of sociological concepts, phenomena, and information sources. Part 1 begins by teaching students to read newspapers and other sociological media sources critically and analytically. It focuses on the crafts of writing and scholarship by providing the basics of grammar, style, formats and source citation, and then introduces students to a variety of rich information resources including the sociological journals and the Library of Congress. Part 2 prepares students to research, read, write, review, and critique sociology scholarship. Finally, Part 3 provides advanced exercises in observing culture, socialization, inequality, and ethnicity and race.

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.

This book explores the possibility of drawing upon a punk ethos to inspire and invigorate sociology. It uses punk to think creatively about what sociology is and how it might be conducted and aims to fire the sociological imaginations of sociologists at any stage of their careers, from new students to established professors.

Ethnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its original home in cultural anthropology to fields such as sociology, marketing, media studies, law, criminology, education, cultural studies, history, geography, and political science. Yet, while more and more students and practitioners are learning how to write ethnographies, there is little or no training on how to write ethnographies well. From Notes to Narrative picks up where methodological training leaves off. Kristen Ghodsee, an award-winning ethnographer, addresses common issues that arise in ethnographic writing. Ghodsee works through sentence-level details, such as word choice and structure. She also tackles bigger-picture elements, such as how to incorporate theory and ethnographic details, how to effectively deploy dialogue, and how to avoid distracting elements such as long block quotations and in-text citations. She includes excerpts and examples from model ethnographies. The book concludes with a bibliography of other useful writing guides and nearly one hundred examples of eminently readable ethnographic books.