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

What you will do in the
Social Issue Paper:
1)Clearly define the issue you will address.
2)
•2) Clearly state your position on the issue.
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•3) Defend your position.
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•4) Conclude concisely.

Technicalities:
•The essay should be at least 1,000 words, but no more than 1,200 words.
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•The first draft is due on SUNDAY, MARCH 20 at 23.59 – please send a copy to your partner AND post
one in the Homework Vault.
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•Your peer review comments are due in class on Tuesday, March 22 - please bring a hard copy to
class for your partner and post a copy to the Homework Vault.
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Why do sociologists write the way they do? (Kai Erikson 2008)
•Because it’s not just what we see, but how we look at it – that we are destined to write more
abstractly (example of looking down in the city from the 14th floor).  •Because we are concerned
with general tendencies rather than particular events.   •Because we think in terms of collateral
arrangements rather than sequential ones…Our eyes are trained on the spaces between interacting
individuals—on the shape of their conversation, the architecture of their transaction, the way the
words are spoken and the gestures enacted, form a composition independent of the persons who make
it up.  •Because our eyes are turned toward the behavior of multitudes, not individuals.

Orwell - Dying Metaphors
•New era business is a whole different ball game.
•The President has his hand firmly on the tiller of government and it is now plain sailing. •That's
just the ticket, old chap. I'm over the moon about it.
•Misuse:
•Tow the line instead of toe the line
•The hammer and the anvil – who gets the worst of it?
•The proof is in the pudding (is in the eating)
•Could care less instead of Couldn’t care less
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Orwell – Operators/Verbal False Limbs
•Characteristic phrases: render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to,
give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself
felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. •My cat Rhonda exhibits
a tendency to sleeping in the day in order to be ready to hunt when night falls. •My cat Rhonda
sleeps in the daytime so she can hunt at night.

Orwell - Pretentious Diction
•phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic,
primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate •epoch-making, epic,
historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable •deregionalize,
impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary
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Orwell - Meaningless Words
•romantic, plastic, values, human, living, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality
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•Fascism, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, and especially, democracy
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•class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality
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•Foreign words and phrases
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The result? Political euphemisms
•Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside,
the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called
pacification. •Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads
with no more than they can carry; this is called transfer of populations or rectification of
frontiers. •People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent
to die in Artic labor camps; this is called elimination of undesirable elements.
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According to Orwell, a scrupulous writer will ask herself at least four questions:
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•What am I trying to say?
•What words will express it?
•What image or idiom will make it clearer?
•Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
•And hopefully two more:
•Could I put it more shortly?
•Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
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George Orwell’s “Rules”
•1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
•2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
•3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
•4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
•5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday
English equivalent.
•6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

•Hanan C. Selvin and Everett Wilson, both uncommonly literate sociologists themselves, contributed
this scrap in 1984:
•The impression is commonplace that a family system marked by such factors as late-age-at marriage,
a high degree of non-marriage, a high incidence of marital disruption, and a low marital fertility
schedule is conducive to the high involvement of women in economic activities outside the home.
•[W]omen who marry late, who remain single, who are separated from their husbands, or who have
fewer children to take care of, are more likely to have jobs away from home.
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•The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations
in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to
repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking
of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural
totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of
structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and
strategies of the rearticulation of power.

•If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition
of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and
classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a
discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
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Some useful and/or interesting links
•Examples of Bad Writing http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/writsamp0.htm •The Bad Writing
Contest: Press Releases, 1996-1998 - http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm •The Elements of Style
  William Strunk, Jr.: http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html
•Maximizing Meaning in Your Text
•http://www.transaction.net/web/tutor/text/index.html
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otCpCn0l4Wo



Plagiarism
• Definition (from Stern 2006) using someone else’s work – words, ideas, or illustrations;
published or unpublished—without giving the creator of that work sufficient credit. • Intentional
vs. unintentional – when in doubt, document. The purpose of documentation is not only to give
credit but also to help the reader locate your source. Besides that, it clearly tells a reader what
ideas are yours and what ideas are someone else’s, and shows how reliable your sources are. •There
are two parts to documentation – the attribution and the reference.
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What you must document:
•Quotations - If you use an author's specific word or words, you must place those words within
quotation marks and you must credit the source. •Information and Ideas - Even if you use your own
words, if you obtained the information or ideas you are presenting from a source, you must document
the source.
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You do not have to document:
•General common knowledge  is factual information considered to be in the public domain, such as
birth and death dates of well-known figures, and generally accepted dates of military, political,
literary, and other historical events. •Field-specific common knowledge is “common” only within a
particular field or specialty. It may include facts, theories, or methods that are familiar to
readers within that discipline. For instance, you may not need to cite a reference to Durkheim’s
concept of anomie – consider your audience.
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•The study presented here takes an unusually comprehensive look at one critical point of entry into
academic performance. It shows a group of freshmen in the transition into the academic discourse of
college, looking at the ways in which they interpret and negotiate an assignment that calls for
reading-to-write. On such tasks, students are reading to create a text of their own, trying to
integrate information from sources with ideas of their own, and attempting to do so under the
guidance of a purpose they must themselves create. Because these reading-to-write tasks ask
students to integrate reading, writing, and rhetorical purpose, they open a door to critical
literacy. Yet this same interaction often makes reading-to-write a difficult process for students
to learn and to manage.

NEXT WEEK’S READINGS
•Mahrer, Kenneth D. 2004. “Proofreading your own writing? Forget it!” The Leading Edge, November.
(2 pp.)
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•Trim, Michelle. 2007. What every student should know about practising peer review. New York:
Pearson Longman, pp. 1-20. (19 pp.)
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•HOMEWORK DUE: 1st draft of social issue essay due March 20 by 12 pm, peer review due in class