The Ten Commandments of Writing

Author(s): Gary Alan Fine

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The American Sociologist, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 152-157
Published by: Springer
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 The Ten Commandments of Writing

Gary Alan Fine

Whatever our areas and methods, social scientists share a common problem: how to
write so as to foster communication. I present aset of propositions to lighten and

brighten sociological writing. Sociologists ought not be afraid these tropes and
of using
techniques of literary writers. Each sociologist must develop a personal style that sparks
an audience. Yet, this poses a challenge for those not trained. Writing is a craft that
must be developed. As Wyndham Lewis noted: "It is dangerous to live, but to write is
much more so."

Although writing about writing carries some of the deserved stigma of a play
wright writing a play about a playwright writing a play, such dirty work is neces
I
sary. propose a set of maxims (or commandments) that might help sociologists
who have little confidence in their own abilities Ten,to position on paper.
words
being a culturally significant number, I have selected Ten Commandments.
It is a commonplace?a cheap shot, perhaps?to claim that sociologists write
poorly. This was pointedly alleged by Malcolm Cowley (1956) in his satiric "So
ciological Habit Patterns in Transmogrification"
and by George Orwell (1946) in
"Politics and the English Language." Such a charge has proven to be a durable way
inwhich to criticize Talcott Parsons, without bothering to read him. Reading well
is nearly as noisome as writing well. Every so often editors of sociological journals
will pick up this theme as the basis of a sermon from their bully pulpit (see Selvin
and Wilson 1984).
With the publication of Howard Becker's Writing for Social Scientists (1986),
sociologists have a text that provides a theory and a methodology forwriting. The
danger is that this book because of its stellar qualities may provide a justification
for others not to think for themselves about how towrite sociology. My goal is to
continue the dialogue on writing towhich Becker has contributed. While there is
much that those who address writing agree upon, there is room for disagreement.
These ten slogans I present involve points of agreement and disagreement with
Becker's approach.

Gary Alan Fine is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Talking

Sociology. Please address all correspondence to Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota,

Minneapolis, MN 55455.

152 The American Sociologist/Summer 1988

 1. Write every day for a long, long time.

There is no better teacher of writing than the keyboard. While practice is not
the only thing necessary for good writing, good writing cannot be had without a
lot of it.Writing teaches you to play with words, to hear phrases, and to sense
what works. Becker describes the process as "editing by ear." This applies not only
towhat is done after the words are on the page, but towhat happens as they are

being selected. When I type, I am listening to these words, and my first clue that
something is amiss iswhen sentences don't sound right. While Imiss a lot as I'm
writing, some of the play of language.
I do catch The longer that Iwork atwriting,
the better my ear becomes.

2. Read what you write.

All of us who have

graded student papers have discovered that many of our
students do not bother to read what they have composed. They wrote it; ipso
facto, they must know what it said. I can't believe some of the things that my mind
and fingers do while I'm writing. A second difficulty of reading what you have
written is that it can be profoundly embarrassing, like watching your naked self.
Talk's body is no smoother than a corporal one. Often this reading is best done
after your phrases have had the chance to settle on paper and in your con
sciousness. Time provides a new perspective and aesthetic distance.

3. Share your writing.

Becker emphasizes arranging for a community of readers, and his point iswell
taken. Cynics allege that the basic function of psychiatry is to provide lonely
with a friend at a Must
patients cost?comradely prostitution. journal reviewers
serve the same purpose? Do not expect reviewers to do your editing. Journal
editors do (at least at Symbolic Interaction, I try to), but not as well as you could
or should (Becker 1986, pp. As a journal editor Imistrust articles that do
94-96).
not have acknowledgements. These articles seem to be too close to first drafts.
Having others read our writing is dangerous, but life is filled with angst, which, if
handled well, may become anxious pleasures.

4. Revise brutally.

I recall that Shakespeare

reading got by writing a single draft of his plays, not
making any changes in his playscript. I do not know if this story is apocryphal, but
it impressed me deeply. This writing technique perhaps explains Pericles, Timon
of Athens, and King John. Whether or not the story is historically accurate, it is
certainly not the way that most sociologists are able to write. While occasionally
we can write bits of Hamlet in the first draft, that is a memorable event. Those
thirty-seven drafts are essential, but you must sense when thirty-eight will make

Fine 153
your writing seem just too precious. You need to remove your self from your
words, and look at them as challenging opponents in a living crossword puzzle

(Becker 1986, p. 94). While Becker's image of rewriting as/?? is a bit much for
my taste, rewriting can be manageable.

5. Develop your own style.

I find an ambivalence in the text of Writing for Social Scientists on the position
of style. Howard Becker does have his own distinctive "spare and lean" style, and
he proclaims its validity. Kai Erikson (1986, p. 809) describes Becker's style as
Puritan, while proclaiming himself a Calvinist, but what of those of us who are
more partial to literary Pentecostalism? Is the bare style truly "better?" Are we
closer to God in Salem than in Selma?
Contrast style to that of another sociological
the Becker stylist, Erving Goffman,
whose writing was baroque and expansive. Consider the opening two sentences of
Becker's Writing for Social Scientists and Goffman's Frame Analysis. First,
Becker: "I have taught a seminar on writing for graduate students several times.
This requires a certain amount of 'chutzpah'" (1986, p. 1). Now, Goffman: "There
is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues thatwhat the reader assumes to
be real a shadow, and that by attending
is but to what the writer says about
perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel
social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a
role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is
pathetic" (1974, p. 1). Goffman is lengthy, passive, abstract, and metaphoric?
sins that Becker warns us about. But it is, to me, great writing. None of us are
Becker or Goffman, although perhaps other sociologists write as well, if dif
ferently. Each of us should develop our own style, knowledgeable of rules and
conventions of writing, but not enslaved to them. For me, the Puritan ideology is
useful, but it is a hard master and other masters provide needed escape. There are
many ways to write well. Yet, although good writing is subjective, there is an
obdurate reality of audience reaction.
Audience a difference. Writing
makes is socially situated, and is designed for
different purposes [illocutionary ends (Austin 1975)]. A funeral oration is not a

proposal of marriage, and their rhetorics vary. The good writer will have a sense of
the circumstances of the reading, and will use that imagined context of the "gen
eralized other" to direct
the tone and shade the color. All rules of writing must be
provisional, not simply because one can "get away" with different things ifone is

good enough, but because good writing means different things depending on the
reader's context. One key difference between lecturing and writing is that the
lecturer has a better sense of the circumstance of the audience and can make
adjustments (Goffman 1981).

6. Use humor, tropes, and poetry.

Sociological writing is so damn dull. In the examples cited above, both Becker
and Goffman attempt to be humorous. Both, and too few of their colleagues, have

154 The American Sociologist/Summer 1988

 a mischievous streak. Using metaphors, figures of speech, poetic language can
enliven an argument and create reader attention. Goffman demonstrates bril
liantly that humor and rigorous analysis can thrive together. Remember that we
are writing for readers, and ifwe can hold their attention, we can communicate
with them. These literary techniques must not interfere with the analysis, but they
can be part of the analysis. They can more effectively make a point than writing
that is deadly dull. Humor, through its ambiguity can provide resonance that
"straight" texts can not. Irony can be effective in shaking a reader from compla
cency, and can provide the distance that some consider so crucial to sociological

analysis. The ironic stance, although not named as such, is embedded in the more
effective writings of C. Wright Mills, notably in The Sociological Imagination
(1959). Writing and analysis should be imaginative.

7. Short is not necessarily sweet.

As a general rule we should favor writing that is not verbose, ifonly to save time
and trees. Yet, there is something about the ideology of brevity with its suggestion
thatwe must remove every last unnecessary word that I find troubling. It implies a
hidden (and unintentional) anti-intellectualism. Such a view suggests that the
sole purpose of writing is to communicate information. Writing is, from this view,
embedded in cost-benefit ratios. How can we maximize the efficiency in our
style? But what about the pleasures of language, of words? Some long sentences
are good sentences; they play in our brain, they can be a conundrum to solve.
Those who excise excess words as if they were cancers, miss the point. We don't
need length for the sake of length, but we don't need brevity for its own sake
either.

8. Sometimes precision may be imprecise.

The Puritan ideology suggests that our goal should be towrite a manuscript that
is incapable of contradictory meanings. We strive for intellectual hegemony over
the reader. Such a view, although commonly held and rarely thought about, may
have unfortunate implications. Imprecise, poetic language has the advantage of
creating a dialogue with the reader. It permits resonance, which precise writing
eliminates. I suspect that it is not accidental that the great sociological theorists
are subject to debates about what they really meant. Iwonder whether the prob
lem was the simple one that they didn't write very well, or whether their writing
was in such a way as to maintain
crafted the function that intellectual writing
should have. Whether Mead could have been clearer in his writings and his lec
tures, we should perhaps be grateful that he wasn't?and so his writings still live
(Fine and Kleinman 1986). Mead's interest in poetry may have had as much to do
with the development of symbolic interaction as what he "really" was trying to
say.

Similarly I find reading Greg Stone's "Appearance and the Self (1970) end

Fine 155
 lessly revealing, because I can never fully understand it. I can understand it

enough so I learn from it each time I read it. Stone wrote a tangle of thoughts,
which his readers must help him to uncover. It is not an easy article, but that is its
charm. As Stone was fond of saying: when the speaker (or writer) and audience
have identicalresponses to a stimulus, the communication is boring and un
needed. A range of possible meanings helps, rather than hinders, the development
of knowledge.

9. Write the first sentence so the reader wants to read the second.

Again, I emphasize thatwe write

for readers. Many of my students, and perhaps
many sociologists, believe
that it is enough to begin a manuscript by saying what
one will do, why, or how. We write sentences that our readers are often loath to
pursue?and, so, we may lose readers. These sentences do not capture our atten
tion.

There are many ways to begin a manuscript, and some good ways. Let me
mention but one: the paradoxical opening. Here one is immediately sucked into
the author's vortex, in order to understand the bizaare, unexpected, outrageous,
or confusing (but always intriguing) claim. Consider Everett Hughes's opening to
"Mistakes atWork":
"The comparative student of man's work learns about doctors
by studying plumbers; and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists." (Hughes
1971, p. 316). Since his readers, perhaps, wanted to know about prostitutes,
particularly without being stigmatized by reading smut, they were hooked. How
can you learn about a doctor from a plumber? A brilliant opening. It would be
very difficult to put down that article after the first sentence?a good thing, too.

10. Lie, sometimes.

There are places for "fact," and places for fiction. In the introduction to Frame
Analysis, Goffman plays with the reader in the analysis of the sentence (which
could have been placed in his Acknowledgements, but wasn't) that "Richard C.
Jeffrey, on the other hand, did not help" (1974, p. 18). We never do find out who
Mr. Jeffrey is, and whether he helped. Does itmatter whether Mr. Jeffrey exists,
and if he exists what his relationship is to the author? Does itmatter whether the
sentence quoted above is factual or fictional? Sometimes creative fictionalizing
helps the author create a good story without harm to the thrust of the argument?
indeed, helping it. Those of us who study personal experience stories or life
histories (our own or others) know that we should not trust them as facts, al
though they can be trusted as narrative. So it iswith our sociological storytelling.
Such stories are effective in encouraging the recall of the ideas behind the stories.
Narratives are more effective than abstracted statistical information in promoting

memory (see Martin 1982). This rule of cognitive processing applies to our

writing.
I am arguing here for the possibility of a sociology that is not so tied to princi

156 The American Sociologist/Summer 1988

 pies of efficiency, conciseness, rationality, and knowledge at the expense of po
etic language, joy, emotion, and insight?a Pentecostal style that transcends the
Puritanism of traditional style manuals. Writing that stands beyond the Protestant
Ethic.

11. Always rewrite your introduction in light of what you say at the end.

As we write, we change, and our openings written long before may no longer be

applicable. I find that it takes time for me to get to a "running start" forwriting.
First paragraphs (and titles) should always be tentative.
As Wyndham Lewis noted: "It is dangerous to live, but to write is much more
so" (Lewis 1952,p. 9, cited in Hintz and Couch 1973, p. 490).

Notes

Presented to the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, August 1987, Chicago, Illnois.
Iwant to thank Barbara Laslett, Sherryl Kleinman, and Douglas Mitchell for comments on an earlier version of this
paper.

References

Austin, J.L. 1975. How to Do Things With Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Becker, Howard. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cowley, Malcolm. 1956. "Sociological Habit Patterns in Transmogrification." Reporter 20 (September 20):4l-43.
Erikson, Erik. 1986. "The Sociologist's Hands." Contemporary Sociology 15:808-11.
Fine, Gary Alan and Sherryl Kleinman. 1986. "Interpreting the Sociological Classics: Can There be a True' Meaning
of Mead." Symbolic Interaction 9:129-46.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
_1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hughes, Everett C. 1971. The Sociological Eye. Chicago: Aldine.
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Harcourt Brace.
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Stone, Gregory. 1970. "Appearance and the Self." Pp. 394-414 in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction,
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