Undergraduates don’t have the same problems with writing that older people have. They write short essays they would not write of their own choice, in a few weeks, on subjects they know nothing about and aren’t interested in, for a reader, who as Shaughnessy says ‘would not choose to read it if he were not being paid to be an examiner’. They know that what they write in this one paper will not affect their lives much. Sociologists and other scholars, on the other hand, write about subjects they know a lot about and care about even more. They write for people they hope are equally interested, and they have no deadlines, other than those their professional situations impose on them. They know that their professional futures rest on how peers and superiors judge what they write. Students can distance themselves from the required writing scholars, novice or professional, can’t. They impose the task on themselves by entering their discipline and have to take it seriously. Being serious, writing scares them more than it does students, which makes the technical problems even harder to solve.
Writing For Social Scientists by Howard S. Becker (via sociolab)
I don’t find writing about Sociology scary, I find it necessary. It’s getting people to listen that’s the hard part.
(via lawsonry)
(via lawsonry)
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