Writing Strategies

Reaching Diverse Audiences

Laurel Richardson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1990
• ISBN:
  9781506349855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

You?ve finished your research and have reached the point of writing it up. You know your findings are important both for your colleagues and for a more general public. But how do you write this material to appeal to different audiences? In Writing Strategies, Laurel Richardson shows you how. Drawing on her own experiences, she carefully outlines strategies for writing up the same research in different ways. By showing the reader the stylistic and intellectual imperatives and conventions of different writing media, she prepares the writer for approaching and successfully addressing diverse audiences. From writing academic papers to trade books, from scientific writing to widely circulated work, your needs will be met using this volume as your personal guidebook. Writing Strategies will be useful to ethnographers, researchers and teachers of language and writing, and to all social scientists trying to present their material in different ways.

"There are lessons for every writer about rhetorical strategies and narrative choices.... She is effective in demonstrating the micro strategies of creating an authorial persona: showing how particular phrases and passages were deployed to convince the reader of the legitimacy of her text, both for the popular market and the academic one."

--Contemporary Sociology

"Excellent advice on getting started, keeping going and crafting your writing advice offered towards appropriate audiences, and much of the advice offered is as applicable to quantitative as qualitative work."

--Social Research Association News

WRITING STRATEGIES
Reaching Diverse Audiences

LAUREL RICHARDSON
The Ohio State University

PART I

Theoretical Issues

1. CONTEMPORARY WRITING ISSUES

As social scientists, we work within, not above, broader historical, social, and intellectual contexts. These contexts serve as frames for the questions we ask, and the answers we get. Characteristic of the current context is the loss of authority and the loss of “a general paradigmatic style for organizing research” (see Marcus and Fisher, 1986, p. 8). This context has been given the somewhat oxymoronic label of “postmodernism” (see Haraway, 1988; Hassan, 1987; Richardson, 1990).

The postmodernist stance challenges claims to a singular, correct style for doing and presenting research and rejects the Enlightenment’s faith in progress through education and rationality. All academic disciplines, to various degrees, have been affected by the postmodernist critique of what constitutes knowledge (truth, beauty, the “canon”), and how and for whom knowledge is created. (See for literary criticism, Eagleton, 1983; Morris, 1988; for the arts, Lather, 1988; for philosophy, Rorty, 1979; for physics, Gleick, 1984; for mathematics, Kline, 1980; for social sciences, Agger, 1989a; Buker, in press; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Denzin, 1986; Harding, 1986; Hutcheon, 1988; McCloskey, 1985; Nicholson, 1990; Rogers, 1989).

When the foundations of knowledge are themselves open to contextualization and indeterminacy, researchers have a “crisis of representation,” uncertainty about what constitutes adequate depiction of social reality (Marcus and Fisher, 1986, p. 8). For social scientists, the problem is not simply devising better techniques and instruments for apprehending social reality, since writing up what one has apprehended is itself a central theoretical and methodological problematic. How do we write (explain, describe, index) the social? (see Brown, 1977; Edmondson, 1984; Richardson, in press-b; Van Maanen, 1988). Language is not simply “transparent,” reflecting a social reality that is objectively out there. Rather, language is a constitutive force, creating a particular view of reality. All language has grammatical, narrative, and rhetorical structures that construct the subjects and objects of our research, bestow meaning, and create value. This is as true for writing as it is for speaking, and as true of science as it is of poetry.

Producing “things” always involves values — what things to produce, what to regard as equivalents, who has the right to name the things, and who defines the relationship between the “things” and the people who name them (see Shapiro, 1985-1986). Writing “things” is no exception. Writing always involves what Roland Barthes refers to as “the ownership of the means of enunciation” (quoted in Shapiro, 1985-1986, p. 195). A disclosure of writing practices, thus, is always a disclosure of forms of power (Derrida, 1982). Power is, always, a sociohistorical construction. No textual staging is ever innocent. We are always inscribing values in our writing. It is unavoidable.

When we write social science, we are using our authority and privileges to tell about the people we study (Richardson, in press-b). No matter how we stage the text, we — as authors — are doing the staging. As we speak about the people we study, we also speak for them. As we inscribe their lives, we bestow meaning and promulgate values. I shall return to this authority issue later. But, now, let us turn to specific science writing issues.

2. SCIENCE WRITING

When we write science, whether we recognize it or not, we write a narrative and create some kind of narrative meaning. Narrative, as understood here, is not confined to literature or case studies but is one of the two basic and universal cognitive modes — the other being the logico-scientific (Bruner, 1986). “Narrative meaning is created by noting that something is a part of the whole and that something is a cause of something else” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 6). Unlike the logico-scientific mode, which looks for universal truth conditions, the narrative mode is contextually embedded and looks for particular connections between events. The connections between the events is the meaning.

Whenever we write science, we are telling some kind of story, or some part of a larger narrative. Some of our stories are more complex, more densely described, and offer greater opportunities as emancipatory documents; others are more abstract, distanced from lived experience, and reinscribe existent hegemonies. Even when we think we are not telling a story, we are, at the very least, embedding our research in a metanarrative, about, for example, how science progresses or how art is accomplished (Lyotard, 1979). Even the shape of the conventional research report reveals a narratively driven subtext: theory (literature review) is the past or the (researcher’s) cause for the present study (the hypothesis being tested), which will lead to the future — findings and implications (for the researcher, the researched, and science). Narrative structures, therefore, are preoperative regardless of whether one is writing primarily in the narrative or logico-scientific mode.

Scientists often resist recognizing that their writings are particular kinds of narratives and that their writing practices are value constituting. Rather, they can easily be “duped” by their own writing practices, which suppresses how real people (the researchers) are ordering and constituting reality, because they draw upon the logico-scientific code (Bruner, 1986), which represents itself as objective and true. But we should not be fooled. Science writing, like all other forms of writing, is a sociohistorical construction that is narratively driven and depends upon literary devices not just for adornment but for cognitive meaning.

Let me, now, briefly narrate the history of the separation of science and literature, before attending to the rhetorical and literary devices within science writing and a much fuller explication of narrative within social science.

Scientific Writing in Historical Context

Since the seventeenth century, the world of writing has been divided into two separate kinds: literary and scientific. From the seventeenth century onward, literature was associated with fiction, rhetoric, and subjectivity, whereas science was associated with fact, “plain language,” and objectivity (Clifford, 1986, p. 5). Fiction was “false” because it invented reality, unlike science, which was “true,” because it simply reported reality, that which scientists observed. Because literature depended upon the evocative devices of metaphor, different readers could interpret the writing in different ways. The desired unambiguous voice of science was violated by literature where a writer willfully said “one thing to illuminate something else” (De Certau, 1983, p. 178).

Abetted by Plato’s expulsion of poets in his Republic, assaults upon literary writing intensified during the eighteenth century. John Locke cautioned adults to forego figurative language lest the “conduit” between “things” and “thought” be obstructed. He urged parents to stifle poetic tendencies in their children. Science, in Locke’s estimation, was of greater value and had to be written in plain style, in words that did not “move the Passions and thereby mislead the Judgement,” unambiguous words unlike the “perfect cheats” of poetic utterances (quoted in Levine, 1985, p. 3). David Hume depicted poets as professional liars. Jeremy Bentham proposed that the ideal language would be one without words, only unambiguous symbols. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary sought to fix “univocal meanings in perpetuity, much like the univocal meanings of standard arithmetic terms” (Levine, 1985, p. 4). This is the linguistic world into which the Marquis de Condorcet introduced the term “social science.” De Condorcet contended that with precision in language about moral and social issues “knowledge of the truth” would be “easy and error almost impossible” (quoted in Levine, 1985, p. 6). Both positivist and interpretive sociologists agreed. Emile Durkheim wanted sociology to cleanse itself of everyday language. Max Weber urged the construction of ideal types as a way to achieve the univocaiity of science. The search for the unambiguous was “the triumph of the quest for certainty over the quest for wisdom” (Rorty, 1979, p. 61).

By the nineteenth century, literature and science stood as two separate domains. Literature was aligned with art and culture. It contained the values of “taste, aesthetics, ethics, humanity, and morality” (Clifford, 1986, p. 6) and the rights to metaphoric and ambiguous language. Given to science was the belief that its words were objective, precise, unambiguous, non-contextual, nonmetaphoric. This is the Faustian bargain that has birthed modern “core” sociology and its homunculus, “midwestern empiricism” (Agger, 1989b),

The Rhetoric of Science

The historical separation of literature and science, however, is not immutable. Today, scholars in a host of disciplines are doing major deconstructive and reconstructive analyses of scientific and literary writing. Their analyses concretely show where and how literary devices are used in science writing. I present this material to lessen the grasp that the idea of “objective” writing has on both quantitative and qualitative writers.

Some of the most powerful analyses are coming from the new rhetoric, also known as the rhetoric of inquiry (see Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey, 1987). The new rhetoric makes two assumptions: first that all writing shares common rhetorical devices such as metaphor, imagery, invocations to authority, and appeals to audience; and second, that each field has its own set of literary devices and rhetorical appeals such as theorems, invisible hands, probability tables, archival records, and first-hand experience, which are themselves rhetorically constructed. Rhetorical devices are not ornamental but instrumental in the “persuasive discourse” of science. Any time words are used, technical writing problems are involved, including the use of rhetoric. “The only road from grammar to logic . . . runs through the intermediate territory of rhetoric” (Frye, 1957, p. 331). Science does not stand in opposition to rhetoric; it uses it. And, conversely, the use of rhetoric is not irrational.

Resistance to the idea of rhetoric in science, however, is strong and is related to the modernist belief in the transparency of language. Intellectual inheritors of the seventeenth century insist that language is intrinsically irrelevant to the scientific enterprise. Like a clear pane of glass, science writing presumably neither distorts nor smudges reality but aims to let “the audience see the external world as it is” (Gusfield, 1976, p. 17). Reality is conceived of as standing outside and independent of any observation of or writing about it. The conduit between thing and thought is unobstructed. This modernist belief in the externality of facts and the neutrality of language, however, is out of step with contemporary scientific thought about science and its construction. Werner Heisenberg, the author of the “uncertainty principle,” for example, states, “Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature” (Heisenberg, 1965, p. 446).

Modernist visions of science writing are also blind to the actual practices of science — rhetorical practices that exist in all the sciences, but vary throughout the centuries (see Nelson et al., 1987). A particularly valuable example of the rhetorical construction of science is Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. Darwin was well aware, as his writer’s notebooks tell us, of the importance of rhetorical staging in constituting scientific ideas. The notebooks reveal Darwin the scientist-rhetorician. Darwin consciously wrote Origins according to the scientific conventions of his time, “Baconian induction and quasi-positivistic standards of proof” (Campbell, 1987, pp. 72-73). He purposefully insisted “that his ideas were the results of ‘facts’ and his metaphors mere expressions of convenience” (Campbell, 1987, p. 72). Darwin’s insistence that he was simply a naturalist gathering facts and working inductively, however, is belied by his notebooks. He had a theory and wanted to solve a theoretical problem — not marshal facts. Disclaimers that his metaphoric language was merely “convenient,” moreover, are contravened by his own nonpositivisitic theories of language. He suppressed how he did his work and why he wrote as he did, because he knew these aberrations would impugn his credibility. He chose to report his work within the methodological conventions important to his colleagues. The protective coloration of scientific conventions disguised Darwin’s heretical ideas and contributed to the survival of his thesis.

Styles of writing science are not fixed or neutral but reflect the historically shifting domination of particular schools or paradigms. Darwin’s style, today, would doom his writing to extinction because the sciences have adopted different rhetorical conventions. This is quite evident in the American Psychological Association’s Publication Manual, 200 pages of rules ranging from punctuation to content and organization. The currently prescribed style gained ascendancy simultaneously with the ascendancy of behaviorist psychology. The articles have become increasingly narrow in scope and focused on a little bit of knowledge — as though knowledge “really” were a bin of bits. The main unifying theme is the hypothesis, which might be repeated up to four times. The repetition elicits a response. The official style institutionalizes behavioristic assumptions about writers, readers, subjects, and knowledge itself. “The prescribed style grants all the participants exactly the role they have in a behavioristic universe” (Bazerman, 1988, p. 126).

All the social sciences have prescribed writing formats — none of them neutral, all of them value constituting. How we are expected to write affects what we can write about. The referencing system in the social sciences discourages the use of footnotes, a place for secondary arguments, novel conjectures, and related ideas. Incorporated into the text, albeit in parentheses, are the publication dates for citations, as though this information counts the most. Knowledge is constituted as focused, problem (i.e., hypothesis) centered, linear, straightforward. Other thoughts are extraneous. Inductively accomplished research is to be reported deductively; the argument is to be abstractable in 150 words or less; and researchers are to identify explicitly with a theoretical-methodological label. Each of these conventions favors — creates and sustains — a particular vision of what constitutes sociological knowledge. The conventions hold tremendous material and symbolic power over social scientists. Using them increases the probability of one’s work being accepted into core social science journals, but they are not prima facie evidence of greater — or lesser — truth value or significance than social science writing using other conventions.

3. LITERARY DEVICES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE WRITING

Social science writing, like all writing, depends upon literary and rhetorical devices to articulate its ideas and make its point, convincingly, credibly, and cognitively. Social science does this, as does all writing, partially by prefiguring its ideas through literary or rhetorical tropes. Two of the most important tropes are synecdoche and metaphor. Neither is merely ornamental. Both tropes convey the credibility of the work and its cognitive content. If we believe we know something, then tropes are at work.

Synecdoche

Synecdoche is a rhetorical technique through which a part comes to stand for the whole, such as an individual for a class. Examples are “roof” standing for “house,” the “gavel” for the “law,” “graybeard” for a “wise old man,” and so on. Synecdoches are ways in which we construct our understanding of the whole, although we only have access to the part. Synecdoches are part of our general cultural heritage and exist in literature as well as science. Archetypes, mythic characters, gods and goddesses have all been viewed as synecdochical, as have some literary characters, such as Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Othello, Desdemona, Romeo, Juliet, Jane Eyre, and Willy Loman.

Within science writing, synecdoches are common as well. For example, DNA is a synec...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Theoretical Issues
• Part II: Practical Solutions
• Conclusion
• References
• About the Author