The Columbia Guide to Social Work Writing

Warren Green, Barbara Levy Simon

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231530330
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Social work practitioners write for a variety of publications, and they are expected to show fluency in a number of related fields. Whether the target is a course instructor, scholarly journal, fellowship organization, or general news outlet, social workers must be clear, persuasive, and comprehensive in their writing, especially on provocative subjects. This first-of-its-kind guide features top scholars and educators providing a much-needed introduction to social work writing and scholarship. Foregrounding the process of social work writing, the coeditors particularly emphasize how to think about and approach one's subject in a productive manner.

The guide begins with an overview of social work writing from the 1880s to the present, and then follows with ideal strategies for academic paper writing, social work journal writing, and social work research writing. A section on applied professional writing addresses student composition in field education, writing for and about clinical practice, the effective communication of policy information to diverse audiences, program and proposal development, advocacy, and administrative writing. The concluding section focuses on specific fields of practice, including writing on child and family welfare, contemporary social issues, aging, and intervention in global contexts. Grounding their essays in systematic observations, induction and deduction, and a wealth of real-world examples, the contributors describe the conceptualization, development, and presentation of social work writing in ways that better secure its power and relevance.

PART ONE

THE FOUNDATIONS OF GOOD WRITING

1

WRITING IN SOCIAL WORK IN THE UNITED STATES: 1880S TO THE PRESENT

Barbara Levy Simon

SOCIAL WORK IN THE UNITED States is a profession about promoting change and offering services. In the three rings of performance that have constituted U.S. social work since its beginnings—practicing with people, communities, and organizations; advocating with and for clients; and creating social work knowledge—there have arisen features of social work writing that are consistent across professional identities and time. Those common dimensions of professional writing have been, necessarily, elasticity and variability. How does a social worker determine which vocabulary, syntax, and format to use in writing, given the triple dimensions of the overall profession?

The particular context and purposes of a social work activity generally shape writing about and within that activity. Since social workers are active in a remarkably wide variety of situations, it follows that we especially privilege flexibility in writing styles and content. The hospital, court, refugee camp, assisted living facility for seniors, group residence for children with severe developmental disabilities, and outpatient mental health clinic constitute just one cluster of many possible work sites, each of which calls for an institutional writing dialect of its own. An effective social worker learns an organization’s vernacular and employs it in writing, while concomitantly noting and incorporating the national and sometimes international linguistic requirements of regulatory and accrediting bodies, auditors, and auspices. The elasticity and variability that denote social work writing—be it about practicing with individuals, families, groups, organizations, or communities; advocating for greater social and economic justice; or building knowledge for practice—are a function of the profession’s responsiveness to local, national, and, increasingly, global imperatives.

A paragraph from social worker Carol Meyer’s first editorial as editor in chief of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work gives a glimpse of both flexible conceptualization and writing in the profession:

The term feminism clearly means whatever a person intends it to mean, and why not? To some it means bread and butter, the search for equality in jobs, education and access to all social, political, and economic institutions. To others, it means personal freedom to choose one’s life-style in matters of relationships, family arrangements, and child care. Perhaps to all, it means a new awareness of oneself as a woman in a patriarchal world and the struggle to help oppressors of women “get it.” In spite of the “backlash” and the generational differences among women in their commitments to the feminist cause, the lives of all women are being redrawn as a consequence of the feminist movement. (Meyer, 1993, p. 6)

Though Carol Meyer was writing for a professional audience, she chose everyday terms like “bread and butter” and “get it” to connote the quotidian and gritty nature of the goals and means of the second wave of the women’s movement. She also selected a political language (“struggle to help oppressors of women” and “patriarchal world”), for two reasons: She was reflecting the political core of a social movement (feminism), and she was writing as the editor in chief of the first professional journal within the field of social work that featured women and girls as clients, community members, and workers.

Compare the same author’s choice of language in a journal article that she wrote 14 years earlier in the flagship journal of U.S. social work, Social Work. Here, in contrast with the article partially quoted above, she was writing as a scholar of social work practice and a futurist of the profession.

From an emphasis on methods, the profession has moved to an orientation in which methods become the servants rather than the masters of practice activities. . . . Perhaps it is now time to apply social work knowledge, values, and skills to an epidemiological orientation. . . .

Social work is presumed by the public and voluntary sectors to be responsible for certain psychosocial problems or conditions of life. Historically, social workers have worked in an institutional framework, thus accounting for their relationships to clients in certain contexts, as in hospitals, clinics . . .

Epidemiology is concerned with the incidence and distribution of disease in the case of public health, but in the case of social work it is concerned with the incidence and distribution of psychosocial adaptations.

This formulation defines social work practice broadly and makes it impossible to limit social work to whatever method social workers happen to know. Practice includes the application of intellectual and assessment skills necessary to understand the social work arena, and, indeed, to individualize need for a range of services. (Meyer, 1979, pp. 269–270)

In this article, Carol Meyer exhibited the elasticity of social work writing in incorporating a public health concept (epidemiology) into her recommendation for a sweeping change in the perspective of social work educators and practitioners. She was both borrowing another profession’s technical word and transforming it into a term resonant with social workers’ everyday practice (psychosocial adaptations). In that way, Meyer could use an old and familiar concept to retain her professional readers’ trust while attempting to rally them to think past an accustomed focus on practice method to a new concentration on professional space and terrain.

As experienced social workers, we generally weigh carefully our readership when committing words to paper, a computer screen, or any other electronic device. We attempt while writing, before finalizing the piece, to anticipate the responses that a client, an agency supervisor, or a colleague might have to a case record, chart note, e-mail message, newsletter article, or publication in a peer-reviewed journal. There are three pivotal questions to ask and answer before finishing any kind of social work writing. First, “What do I think is most important to say?” Second, “Who will be my primary reader(s) of this document?” And third, “What will my reader(s) most likely care about in this written communication?”

Take the example of a social worker in a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) vet center who is formally recording her or his use of cognitive processing therapy with a veteran of the war in Iraq that began in 2003. The veteran in question has been grappling with the anguish of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The vet center social worker follows a writing protocol that is: (1) a function of VA regulations, customs, and expectations; (2) a reflection of the evidence bases and best practices available to trauma specialists; (3) a manifestation of the procedures and terminology of the particular intervention in use, in this case, cognitive processing therapy; (4) an outgrowth of social work’s commitment to protecting the confidentiality and respecting the dignity of each patient, client, or constituent; and (5) an artifact of reporting in a computerized medium.

For example, were the vet center social worker discussed in the paragraph above writing to secure her supervisor’s official support for referring a client with PTSD to a vet center counseling group made up of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD, she might well use the language and categories of the most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (currently DSM-IV-TR) to document the need for the referral to a treatment group (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Additionally, the social worker would probably cite a recent article or book on the treatment of PTSD that recommends client involvement in a treatment group as part of a cluster of therapeutic responses to former soldiers or sailors with PTSD (Zappert & Westrup, 2008, p. 374). Finally the vet center social worker in this circumstance would emphasize the urgency of the referral, noting the social isolation of the patient and his stated interest in joining a group of veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who would know firsthand the experience of both contemporary war and PTSD.

This social worker at the vet center would, in one written message, deploy and link two of three professional voices. She or he would communicate as a social work practitioner, drawing on accumulated skills, experience, and empathy as an experienced cognitive processing therapist and group psychotherapist in pointing out the probable advantages that would accrue for the veteran in combining group treatment among soldier peers with individual psychotherapy. Also, this VA social worker would rely, as a practicing professional, on applied social and behavioral science, employing, only after critical review, the analysis and credibility of DSM-IV-TR and recent mental health peer-reviewed literature from a variety of professions and academic disciplines in seeking written authorization from a supervisor. Additionally, the same written request to a supervisor for a referral would advocate quick action, highlighting the importance of providing the best possible care in the tradition of the VA and its commitment to former soldiers and sailors.

FINDING SOCIAL FACTS AND ENACTING SOCIAL ETHICS: SOCIAL WORK’S MISSIONS

“Social facts and social ethics,” in the words of historian Thomas Bender, became the focus of social liberals of the western hemisphere, including most founders of social work, in the last two decades of the 19th century (Bender, 2006, p. 255). To find social facts is to secure accurate and illuminating information about human beings, their interconnections, activities, and contexts across their life course (Elder, 1974). To enact social ethics is to accomplish two different, though related, functions: first, to shape and offer services and programs that meet pressing human needs and support emergent or dormant human capacities; and second, to make demands for a more just society and economy—that is to say, to advocate for specific constitutive elements of social and economic justice.

In other words, social work is at one and the same time a broad continuum of practices, a pursuit of social and economic justice, and an investigatory art and science. Most of the profession’s members face daily the rigors of two of these three distinct domains, each of which demands particularized forms of labor and corresponding specialized modes of writing. Frequently, social workers’ identities clash in the midst of decisions and actions. Sometimes they coexist necessarily but tensely. On fortunate occasions, social workers’ identities as practitioners, advocates, and investigators are enacted in harmony.

To comprehend how pivotal elasticity and variability in social work writing are, whether at a vet center or at one of the many thousands of other venues in which social work in the United States of the 21st century is practiced, it is first necessary to grasp the elasticity and variability of the profession itself. As is often the case, understanding a profession requires that we first delve into its historical roots, evolution, and key components. Only then can we sensibly grasp why its writing shifts shapes so fluidly.

THE CONTEXT OF THE SOCIAL WORK PROFESSION’S EMERGENCE

Political liberals of the early and mid-19th century in the Atlantic and European worlds were inspired by Enlightenment thought and disgusted with the constraints of autocratic and mercantilist rule. Guided by thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, liberals of the first three quarters of the 19th century sought freedom for individuals and markets from oppressive and intrusive state control.

The United States became one of the laboratories of political liberalism in the West. During and after the U.S. Civil War, the country experienced an unprecedented increase in the number and size of cities because of railroads, industrialization, globalizing commerce, and immigration. Escalating urban concentrations of people, industry, and capital resulted in intensifying crises. Many metropolitan tenements, neighborhoods, and workplaces became centers of destitution, danger, and death. Starting in the 1880s, large numbers of political liberals “lost faith in the capacity of the market to create social justice” (Bender, 2006, p. 255).

Disillusioned political liberals evolved into social liberals, people who surrendered laissez-faire politics and economics for a commitment to an active democratic state that could and would regulate the excesses of unfettered capitalism, industry, and greed. Social work, first as a set of volunteer activities, then as a profession, emerged as one key pathway by which social liberals sought social facts and demonstrated social ethics.

SOCIAL WORK AS A CIVIC PROFESSION

The profession of social work corresponds closely to the concept of civic professionalism that philosopher and educator William M. Sullivan has constructed. He analyzed a cluster of “civic professions,” including social work, urban planning, and public administration, among others, which were created during the Progressive era, from roughly 1885 through 1917. Advocates of professionalism in that period, Sullivan argued, found the unexamined faith in capitalism’s economic competitiveness far too narrow and shortsighted to serve as an organizing premise for the rapidly growing U.S. society and economy or for the new civic professions. Instead, the leaders of these new professions developed, according to Sullivan, “a conception of highly skilled workers who could bring to a variety of occupations a broader, more socially responsive sense of calling, combining something of religious dedication with the civic ideals of traditional humanism and the scientific virtues” (Sullivan, 1995, p. xvi). Sullivan claims that the concept of civic professionalism forged during the Progressive era offered to individual professionals “a design for living that promised to give individual occupational achievement moral meaning through responsible participation in civic life” (Sullivan, 1995, p. 65). Elizabeth Agnew, a biographer of a prominent social work founder, Mary Richmond, asserts that “professionals and progressives together incorporated into their work principles of scientific expertise and efficiency, while they simultaneously promoted public education and citizen participation as key elements in constructing a morally and politically integrated civic life” (Agnew, 2004, p. 136).

Full participation in moral and political civic life in early social work entailed immediate responsiveness as direct practitioners to underrepresented people’s concerns, broad and long-term advocacy, and scientific inquiry in relation to urban poverty and industrial working conditions. Social workers during and since the Progressive era have embraced the interdependent triad of direct practice, systemic advocacy, and social and behavioral scientific inquiry as the three-sided foundation of the profession.

SOCIAL WORK AS PRACTICE

By far the largest and best-known aspect of social work in the United States is that of direct practice with individuals, couples, families, groups, communities, and organizations. As dusk fell on the 19th century, Jane Addams, one of the shapers of social work in the United States, wrote that “the ideal and developed settlement [meaning, settlement house or neighborhood center] would attempt to test the value of human knowledge by action, and realization, quite as the complete and ideal university would concern itself with the discovery of knowledg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword. A Social Work Leader on Writing
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Foundations of Good Writing
• Part II Applied Professional Writing
• Part III Writing in Distinct Fields of Practice
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index