Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) - Softcover

Stein, Arlene; Daniels, Jessie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022636478X ISBN 13: 9780226364780

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

At a time when policy discussions are dominated by “I feel” instead of “I know,” it is more important than ever for social scientists to make themselves heard. When those who possess in-depth training and expertise are excluded from public debates about pressing social issues—such as climate change, the prison system, or healthcare—vested interests can sway public opinion in uninformed ways. Yet few graduate students, researchers, or faculty know how to do this kind of work—or feel empowered to do it.

While there has been an increasing call for social scientists to engage more broadly with the public, concrete advice for starting the conversation has been in short supply. Arlene Stein and Jessie Daniels seek to change this with Going Public, the first guide that truly explains how to be a public scholar. They offer guidance on writing beyond the academy, including how to get started with op-eds and articles and later how to write books that appeal to general audiences. They then turn to the digital realm with strategies for successfully building an online presence, cultivating an audience, and navigating the unique challenges of digital world. They also address some of the challenges facing those who go public, including the pervasive view that anything less than scholarly writing isn’t serious and the stigma that one’s work might be dubbed “journalistic.”

Going Public shows that by connecting with experts, policymakers, journalists, and laypeople, social scientists can actually make their own work stronger. And by learning to effectively add their voices to the conversation, researchers can help make sure that their knowledge is truly heard above the digital din.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arlene Stein is professor of sociology at Rutgers University, where she directs the Institute for Research on Women. She is the author of four books, including Reluctant Witnesses and The Stranger Next Door, and has written for the Nation, Jacobin, and the New Inquiry, among others. Jessie Daniels is professor of sociology and critical social psychology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author or editor of five books, including Cyber Racism and Being a Scholar in the Digital Era, and blogs at Racism Review.

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Going Public

A Guide for Social Scientists

By Arlene Stein, Jessie Daniels, Corey Fields

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-36478-0

Contents

Introduction: So You Want to Go Public?, 
1 Writing beyond the Academy, 
2 Telling Stories about Your Research, 
3 Books for General Audiences, 
4 The Digital Turn, 
5 Building an Audience, 
6 The Perils of Going Public, 
7 Making it Count, Making a Difference, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Writing beyond the Academy

Arthur Kleinman, a medical anthropologist who writes about how culture shapes notions of disease and healing, aspires to write prose that is "arresting and beautiful." Most of the time he fails to achieve this, but that does not discourage him, he says. "It is the journey of aspiration that counts, that lets you weigh the best words of strong writers and test them against your own strengths, that lets you experiment, eventually comes to burnish and improve what you do write. And that will matter for your readers and ultimately for the writer in you."

In this age of digital technology, predictions about the demise of the written text, the end of the book, and even the death of the author are commonplace. Nonetheless, writing remains key to communicating. Writing is still the primary way intellectuals win respect for their ideas and influence people. Everyone would prefer to read lively, well-written work. Good writing strives for clarity, energy, and engagement. It is clear, concise, at times personal, and passionate. It conveys its argument economically, and makes the reader want to read what the writer has to say. Rather than simply reporting on research, it engages in a conversation about that research with others.

Writing well is central to learning how to translate your work to broader audiences. In this chapter, we offer four basic principles for creating writing that can participate in lively conversations with varied audiences, not just other academics, but also with nonacademic friends, families, different publics, and even, at times, the people we study — insights culled from our experiences as writers, editors, and teachers of graduate students.

Principle #1: Think of Yourself as a Writer

When we're in graduate school, learning the tools of the academic trade, few of us spend very much time or effort thinking and talking about writing. Many professors assume that students simply know how to write. That may be a fair enough assumption at many elite departments, where students often enter with high levels of cultural capital and solid prior training. Writing is something that comes easily to some people, but for most of us, that isn't true. Good writers aren't born — they're made. Writing is, in other words, a craft that takes learning, and practice. Craftsmen — and women — combine technical skill with imagination and pride in their work.

We tend to imagine a craftsman as a carpenter of sorts, but craftspersons can also be found in the laboratory, concert hall, classroom, and in the study. As artisans, they are dedicated to good work for its own sake — to practical activity — but their labor is not simply a means "to another end," such as career advancement. They are engaged in the fullest way possible with their work and refuse to split their work from the rest of life. A mixture of technique and inspiration, good writing requires an acquaintance with the methodologies of research needed for the task. But there is, C. Wright Mills believed, an unexpected quality about writing too — a "playfulness of mind, as well a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks." The technician wrote Mills, "is too well trained, too precisely trained. Since one can be trained only in what is already known, training sometimes incapacitates one from learning new ways; it makes one rebel against what is bound to be at first loose and even sloppy."

Mills saw writing as a form of self-expression that is as much about the process as the product. A mixture of technique and inspiration, writing is not something that simply happens at the end of the research process. "I am trying to make it damn good all over," Mills wrote of his book White Collar. "Simple and clean cut in style, but with a lot of implications and subtleties woven into it. It is my little work of art: it will have to stand for the operations I will never do, not being a surgeon, and for the houses I never built, not being an architect. So you see it has to be a thing of craftsmanship and art as well as science."

Rather than seeing good writing as ornamental at best, or narcissistic or time wasting at worst, we should see it as an integral part of our work, a creative practice that requires practice and dedication, which should have personal meaning for the writer. In this era of academic speedup, as we churn out paper after paper, we rarely pause to craft the elegant phrase. Publishing may stave off one kind of perishing but lead to a less imperceptible but no less insidious kind of wasting: the production of routine work that fails to inspire oneself — or to inspire others. Intellectual craftsmanship, and taking one's writing seriously, can be a mode of resistance. The main reason, Mills said, "I am not alienated is because I write." Writing can make us feel more connected to others, and more connected to the society in which we live.

Principle #2: Know Your Audience

We write for ourselves, to express our ideas and work them out, but we also write for others. And yet, writing guru Helen Sword warns, "Like lecturers droning on and on in front of classrooms full of dozing students, many academics pay no attention to their audience: They write, but they don't communicate." To write is to raise a claim for the attention of readers, said Mills. Effective writing, in other words, isn't simply an abstract quality — it is about a relationship between a writer and readers. "The skill of writing is to get the reader's circle of meaning to coincide exactly with yours," declared Mills, and "to write in such a way that both of you stand in the same circle of controlled meaning."

The best writers cultivate an authoritative yet conversational voice that bridges the gap between writer and reader. They always sound like human beings. The successful writer, according to Mills, "is a [person] who may shout, whisper, or chuckle, but who is always there." She plays down her erudition instead of scaffolding herself with it. To do so, it is crucial to write with a particular audience in mind; being an effective communicator means knowing your audience. Good writers must develop the knack of putting ourselves in our readers' place, seeing the text through their eyes. If you assume you are a voice, but are not "altogether aware of any public," cautioned Mills, "you may easily fall into unintelligible ravings."

Academics tend to write for a finite group of other experts. Early in graduate school, the audience in your head probably consisted of your professors. For a first book, which often emerges out of a dissertation, you may widen that audience to include particular professors on a tenure committee. Later on, you may imagine an audience comprised of all the experts in your field. If you're writing a journal article, that's fair enough. You should probably write with the editors, reviewers, and readers of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022636478X
• ISBN 13: 9780226364780
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Zeichner: Fields Corey
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland