SOC 776/978
WRITING SOCIOLOGY
B. Nadya Jaworsky
Room 3.59
Consultation Hours:
Tuesdays 14.00-15.00
or by appointment

REQUIREMENTS FOR WEEKS 11-12
•2-3 page summary of work to date that expands your initial sentence, including: development of
research question and potential hypothesis or answer; touch upon literature available; how you will
actualize – method; hint at your potential argument – due TUESDAY, MAY 3, 2016 at 23.59.
•Meeting with me BEFORE MAY 10:
–Elevator story (90-seconds)
–“Stuck on an elevator” story  (5-10 minutes)
–Receive feedback on the 2-3 page summary
–
–

My elevator story
(90 seconds or less)
•
•I am working on the problem of (state your question). •I think I can show that (state your
hypothesis) because (state your reasons). •My best evidence is (summarize your evidence).
•

EAL (English as an additional Language) Scholars
•“The topic is of potential interest…However, the paper falls short in making an original
contribution to current knowledge in the field.” •And inevitably one of the first sentences is
often: “Understandably, the paper needs further editing and stylistic changes.” Or even more
directly: “Clearly, this paper wasn’t written by a native speaker.”

Metadiscursive choices
•…the writer’s choices of rhetorical moves and discursive elements, which provide the means to make
the specific disciplinary content of the text intelligible, coherent and persuasive to a particular
audience. Metadiscursive choices assist the reader to smoothly interpret the text in particular
ways, while conveying the writer's credibility and relationship to the text and audience. The
meaning of any text depends crucially on these choices. It is not enough to master the straight-up
grammatical and technical content of the paper; the writer must also know how to frame the content,
align with the audience and convey their own authority and voice, all within the norms of
particular disciplinary communities.

Some concrete tasks:
•Write often and write early
•Do some detective work (general journals, area journals, topic journals)
•Take advice!
•

Some concrete tips:
•Professionalism counts
•Link your data and your claims
•Avoid sweeping generalizations
•Effective use of citations
•Craft an effective structure for the manuscript

Structure of a Research Essay
•Introduction
•Review of Literatures
•Method/Methodology
•Argument/Findings/Data
•Discussion (often intertwined with Findings)
•Conclusion

Some concrete tips:
•Show a novel contribution
•Engage with the relevant literatures
•Don’t give us the data secondhand
•Show us your methods
•Revise, revise, revise!
•

Some concrete tips:
•About the title and the abstract
•The “take-away”
•Theory, frameworks and perspectives
•Going beyond the data
•Assertions of causality (“proving something”)
•Quantitative analysis interpretation errors
•Qualitative data: convince me (show; don’t tell)
•Size of the effect (not just the significance)
•Don’t “journal shop”
•Quality of the writing
•

Some concrete tips:
•http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/
•http://ocs.yale.edu/content/samplestools-graduate-students-and-postdoctoral-scholars
•http://www.lse.ac.uk/intranet/CareersAndVacancies/careersService/CVCoverApps/CVs/ExampleCVs.aspx
•http://www.lse.ac.uk/intranet/CareersAndVacancies/careersService/CVCoverApps/CVCoverLetterGuide.pd
f
•

NEXT WEEK’S READINGS
•REQUIRED READING:
•Becker, Writing for Social Scientists, Ch. 3 & 4 (45 pp.)
•Turabian, Ch. 12-16, pp. 115-142 (27 pp.)
•Thesis writing instructions (5 pp.)
•
•HOMEWORK: Meeting with professor by May 10 to discuss research essay progress
•
•OPTIONAL: Becker, Writing for Social Scientists, Chapters 5 & 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otCpCn0l4Wo