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Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences
Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig's witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples from diverse fields such as linguistics, sociology and experimental social psychology, Billig shows how technical terminology is regularly less precise than simpler language. He demonstrates that there are linguistic problems with the noun-based terminology that social scientists habitually use – 'reification' or 'nominalization' rather than the corresponding verbs 'reify' or 'nominalize'. According to Billig, social scientists not only use their terminology to exaggerate and to conceal, but also to promote themselves and their work.
240 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2013
27 people are currently reading
357 people want to read
About the author
Michael Billig
28 books30 followersMichael Billig is Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University . Working in contemporary social psychology, he trained in Bristol with Henri Tajfel as an experimental psychologist and helped design the so called minimal group experiments which were foundational to the social identity approach. He moved away from experimental work to considering issues of power, political extremism and ideology in a series of important books. His Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations (1976) offered a trenchant critique of orthodox approaches to prejudice in psychology. Fascists (1979) helped reveal the classic fascist and anti-semitic ideology underlying the UK's National Front at a time when it was bidding for political legitimacy and electoral success. In the 1980s his focus shifted to everyday thinking and the relationship between ideology and common sense. This strand of work is shown in the collectively written work Ideological Dilemmas (1988 - with Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton and Radley), Banal Nationalism, and in his major study of ideology and the UK royal family, Talking of the Royal Family (1998, 2nd Edition).
His influence runs across the social sciences and he has been one of the key figures highlighting and reinvigorating the use of classic rhetorical thinking in the context of social issues. For example, he shows that attitudes are best understood not as individual positions on topics, but as emergent in contexts where there is a potential argument. This perspective is introduced in his book Arguing and Thinking (2nd Edition, 1996) and has been the basis for innovative approaches to topics as diverse as psychoanalysis, humour and nationalism. It is also an important element to discursive psychology.
Billig is Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University where he has worked since 1985. He is a member of the internationally influential Discourse and Rhetoric Group, working with figures such as Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter.
His influence runs across the social sciences and he has been one of the key figures highlighting and reinvigorating the use of classic rhetorical thinking in the context of social issues. For example, he shows that attitudes are best understood not as individual positions on topics, but as emergent in contexts where there is a potential argument. This perspective is introduced in his book Arguing and Thinking (2nd Edition, 1996) and has been the basis for innovative approaches to topics as diverse as psychoanalysis, humour and nationalism. It is also an important element to discursive psychology.
Billig is Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University where he has worked since 1985. He is a member of the internationally influential Discourse and Rhetoric Group, working with figures such as Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 16, 2013
Stupendous. Wonderful. Read it.
***
What all books should look like when you've read them:
SN: Got this classic example in my inbox this morning, 15 Oct 2013:
". . . 'celebritization’ is conceptualized as a meta-process that grasps the changing nature, as well as the societal and cultural embedding of celebrity, which can be observed through its democratization, diversification and migration. It is argued that these manifestations of celebritization are driven by three separate but interacting moulding forces: mediatization, personalization and commodification."
***
What all books should look like when you've read them:
SN: Got this classic example in my inbox this morning, 15 Oct 2013:
". . . 'celebritization’ is conceptualized as a meta-process that grasps the changing nature, as well as the societal and cultural embedding of celebrity, which can be observed through its democratization, diversification and migration. It is argued that these manifestations of celebritization are driven by three separate but interacting moulding forces: mediatization, personalization and commodification."
November 29, 2014
"Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences" is truly a gem and any budding social scientist would put themselves at an intellectual advantage by reading it. The author takes a unique perspective, which is partly internal (examining the ideas in social sciences) and partly external (examining the social and institutional context for the ideas and practices of social scientists). Billig is an impressively clear writer. His wit and insights are engaging and so the book is a joy to read. As the title suggests, the book is about writing, but a thorough examination of writing in social sciences includes a closer look at how universities work, how academic jobs work, how certain theories succeed while others fail, etc.
Billig takes us on a tour that includes all these aspects of academic life and relates them all back to how they influence they way social scientists write. There are commentaries that cover the facts about how we become a member of an academic discipline, the facts about academic networking, the facts about publishing in academic journals, and so forth. Billig brings the voices of George Orwell, William James, Freud, and several important contemporaries to clarify his positions. We learn the epidemic use of three-letter-acronyms (TLAs), the over-using of nouns and under-using of verbs, the ways in which writers end up describing the social reality in a way that contains no people, but instead a set of abstract variables. We also learn what each of these widespread practices accomplish. Finally, the book ends with a set of concrete, practical advice for improving our writing/thinking practices. Once again, I highly recommend it!
Billig takes us on a tour that includes all these aspects of academic life and relates them all back to how they influence they way social scientists write. There are commentaries that cover the facts about how we become a member of an academic discipline, the facts about academic networking, the facts about publishing in academic journals, and so forth. Billig brings the voices of George Orwell, William James, Freud, and several important contemporaries to clarify his positions. We learn the epidemic use of three-letter-acronyms (TLAs), the over-using of nouns and under-using of verbs, the ways in which writers end up describing the social reality in a way that contains no people, but instead a set of abstract variables. We also learn what each of these widespread practices accomplish. Finally, the book ends with a set of concrete, practical advice for improving our writing/thinking practices. Once again, I highly recommend it!
May 21, 2018
Fascinating examination of the forces that (mis)shape current writing in the social sciences. Close careful reading and plentiful examples make this intriguing.
November 22, 2018
3,5 stars, really. Starts off full blast with a critique of the current academic world, where publish or perish rules and promotion takes over from analysis. The best books are the kind that make you squirm uncomfortably as you recognise yourself in the descriptions. The point about nominalisation and passives is important, but gets a bit repetitive. More worryingly, what is presented as a critique of form is actually much bigger theoretical issue. I can't believe Billig is unaware of sociological approaches that consider social structures to have causal powers. He cites Marx, after all... So sometimes in sociological theory, abstract concepts do things. The point is still taken that that of course still begs the question where the people are, but it's about more than language. Anyway, highly recommended!
January 22, 2024
Billig has something worth saying and describes well how social scientists overuse big nouns and noun phrases, revert to the passive voice, rely on technical jargon and remove humans from their writing. He also has some more challenging ideas about how these ways of writing encourage sloppy thinking and cover up weak ideas.
However, he is guilty of other forms of bad writing that are also common in the social sciences. He goes on too long, does not think through his arguments to balance them properly and ultimately ends up writing about something totally different.
Like so many books with polemic tendencies, this is 50 pages of content stretched to over 200 pages of text. As a result, Billig repeats himself in paragraph after paragraph and then does so again in the next chapter. I rarely skim-read books but found myself doing so repeatedly in the final third as I realised there was little there that hadn't already been said. It's a shame because there is more to say.
I would have liked to read more thinking about when it is and is not appropriate to create new nouns or noun phrases. When Billig writes about modern academic life, he does so well and captures how the spirit of publish or perish infects writing styles. But he never quite focuses on this at length. By the final substantive chapter on social psychology he is reduced to critiquing basic statistical analysis errors which, while prevalent, are not really about writing at all. More generally, my impression is Billig is a social scientist who has little interest in phenomena that do not reduce tk the individual level and, therefore require a degree of 'unpopulated writing'. The writer cannot say a person does X if X is not done by people.
To his credit though, the recommendations that complete the book are clear and useful. There are also moments of genuine humour and, as so often with academic writing, the quality and richness of the writing is greatest when the author has something meaningful to say rather than just pages to fill.
However, he is guilty of other forms of bad writing that are also common in the social sciences. He goes on too long, does not think through his arguments to balance them properly and ultimately ends up writing about something totally different.
Like so many books with polemic tendencies, this is 50 pages of content stretched to over 200 pages of text. As a result, Billig repeats himself in paragraph after paragraph and then does so again in the next chapter. I rarely skim-read books but found myself doing so repeatedly in the final third as I realised there was little there that hadn't already been said. It's a shame because there is more to say.
I would have liked to read more thinking about when it is and is not appropriate to create new nouns or noun phrases. When Billig writes about modern academic life, he does so well and captures how the spirit of publish or perish infects writing styles. But he never quite focuses on this at length. By the final substantive chapter on social psychology he is reduced to critiquing basic statistical analysis errors which, while prevalent, are not really about writing at all. More generally, my impression is Billig is a social scientist who has little interest in phenomena that do not reduce tk the individual level and, therefore require a degree of 'unpopulated writing'. The writer cannot say a person does X if X is not done by people.
To his credit though, the recommendations that complete the book are clear and useful. There are also moments of genuine humour and, as so often with academic writing, the quality and richness of the writing is greatest when the author has something meaningful to say rather than just pages to fill.
August 2, 2018
"This is an age of academic mass publication and certainly not a time for academic idealists."
As a political scientist, I know Billig from his most famous work: Banal Nationalism. I did not have a clue about "Learn to Write Badly" until I stumbled upon it very recently. If you're an academic idealist, or a young academic with certain doubts and issues about academic writings, I believe you'll find this book very helpful.
As a political scientist, I know Billig from his most famous work: Banal Nationalism. I did not have a clue about "Learn to Write Badly" until I stumbled upon it very recently. If you're an academic idealist, or a young academic with certain doubts and issues about academic writings, I believe you'll find this book very helpful.
March 14, 2021
Repetitive. Full of unnecessary metaphores and tropes to literature. This book is very lengthy for things which could be said on a much smaller scale. Simultaneously, I cannot agree with the author on multiple topics and views. To me it seems, he often shares an opinion rather than an educated evidence-based critique.
July 12, 2022
This book makes a point about all sciences, not just the social sciences. The point is that we overuse nouns in our writing. Thereby, we lose touch with people and their actions, and we also conjure up theoretical constructions that make little sense. Sure, the book could be shorter and the argument more succinct. But I found the book rewarding and thought-provoking.
January 7, 2021
Must read for everyone working in the social scienes to reflect on our own writing. Funny, insightful, helpful.
January 6, 2025
Brilliant.
December 8, 2016
You probably only need to read Chapter 4, where he makes his main point. There are interesting bits scattered through the rest of the book to browse through, but these aren't essential to understanding the main argument.
True enough, social scientists are addicted to neologism nouns like "governmentality" and "mediatization," and this does produce "unpopulated" writing, and it is driven by publish-or-perish.
True enough, social scientists are addicted to neologism nouns like "governmentality" and "mediatization," and this does produce "unpopulated" writing, and it is driven by publish-or-perish.
June 2, 2015
I give it five stars because it is one of the few "how-to" type of books that successfully combine sociological analysis, stylistic analysis, and clarity! Chapter 5 "turning people into things" can be good assignment readings although the whole book deserves priority in various "how-to“ books in the academia!
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December 13, 2013808.0663 B5981 2013
November 2, 2014
Billig makes a clear point about the abundance of technical jargon and passivity in social sciences writing.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews