I blame it on IQ tests. Many undergraduates arrive at Berkeley with the idea that writers, like geniuses, are born rather than made. They imagine that my colleagues and I simply sit down and write books and articles in pretty much finished form, spending little time on drafts or any hours at all on editing and reformulating. A lot of undergraduates despair because they think that if they were not born writers, they are condemned never to be very good at it.
Yet, as you will learn here, the genius model of writing is wrong. Just as psychologists have discovered that many differences in I.Q. scores have environmental, not genetic, roots, so too is writing an ability that can be nurtured and improved. All the good writers I know spend hours rewriting and reworking unclear text, put in days painfully confronting their own fuzzy thinking, and devote much attention to the craft of writing itself.
The academic environment is a writing-intensive environment, and during your college years you will be asked to write dozens of assignments—from brief response papers to essay exams to full-fledged research papers. We ask you to write because we want you to learn a skill that you will need in the future, whether you decide to become an activist or an attorney, a professor or a physician, a social worker or a software engineer. We also ask you to write because—above all else—we want to teach you to think clearly, precisely, and profoundly.
The Writing for Sociology guide grows out of the Berkeley Sociology Department’s quest to find ways to teach our undergraduates to become better writers. Beginning in 2005, we decided to tackle head-on the writing difficulties that many of our faculty and graduate student instructors were observing in the courses they were teaching. We began by organizing a series of department-wide colloquia on different techniques for teaching writing and for incorporating sociological writing into undergraduate courses. We also decided to prioritize writing instruction in allocating Graduate Student Instructors to undergraduate courses. Once our new emphasis on writing instruction had been in place for a year, we met to compare notes and to figure out what was working well and what needed to be improved. We agreed at that meeting that the one thing that would most help all of us— undergraduates, graduate student instructors, and faculty—would be a short booklet on writing for sociologists.
Producing this guide has been a labor of love. Led by Jennifer Jones and Sarah Quinn, the graduate students in the Berkeley Sociology Department have built on their experiences as Graduate Student Instructors to put together a writing guide that they wish they had had when they were undergraduates. I echo that wish—perhaps I’d have spent fewer hours pulling out my hair over my own lousy first drafts if I’d had this guide when I first set out to learn the craft of writing. I hope that you will use this labor of love to make yourself a better writer.
The full text of Writing for Sociology, second edition, can be found at: http://sociology.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/documents/student_services/writing_guide/Writing%20for%20Sociology%20Guide%20Second%20Edition.pdf
Kim Voss (Sociology)