Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article: Second Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Review

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Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article: Second Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) ReviewStarting Chapter 1 of my dissertation proposal scared the living daylights out of me. Where to start? How much do I need to research and read before I actually start writing? And then there is the never-ending "Here's just one more article/book/website I need to read/investigate before I can even start *thinking* about writing" refrain...
Becker, in a very straight-forward and humorous manner, gets you going. He lets you know the absolute fear you are feeling is perfectly normal and that the first draft is just that - a first draft. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it *shouldn't* be perfect. After reading this book, I simply sat down and started writing. I didn't worry about punctuation or sentence structure, I just wrote. Some of it ended up in the trash, but much of what I wrote on the first go-around was molded into some very good work.
Thanks to Howard Becker I think I might actual graduate!Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article: Second Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Overview

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Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Review

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Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) ReviewStorycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) by Jack Hart, the former Oregonian editor and narrative reporting coach covers the topic from a newspaper perspective, but the content applies not only to all creative narrative nonfiction but to many aspects of fiction writing as well. I recommend it to any author who wonders what "show don't tell" really means.
And I'll go even a step further: Storycraft is the perfect book for anyone seeking a better understanding of life. Jack writes, "The world delivers the facts, and nonfiction specialists have to make some sense of them," but all of us have the same longing when we encounter life's inexplicable tragedies, foiled destinies, or even just worrisome little events we witness.
Every life is packed with scenes and stories, as much action as a rousing novel, but with all the boring routine intervening. When we ponder life's climactic moments, we find the context that links our lives with humanity's common attributes. And just like an investigating reporter, we can use the techniques in Storycraft to wring meaning out of reality.
To paraphrase a point Jack makes, the ultimate payoff for Storycraft is when you can follow life's story from its specific unfolding to its underlying cosmic truth and then bring that new abstraction to bear on other specifics in your own and others' lives.Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Overview

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The Craft of Research, 2nd edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Review

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The Craft of Research, 2nd edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) ReviewI used this book as the text for a freshman-sophomore course, Introduction to Christian Academics. It is very clearly written, and the information it presents will help anyone understand what they are reading. It is not just for people writing dissertations. To understand and to be able to analyze what you read, you need to know how arguments are constructed -- what constitutes evidence, what are the steps of reasoning, what is the role of the warrant of an argument. My students liked the book a lot. We later used it as a reference in a graduate course. It was worthwhile there, too. This book is one of the half dozen or so that belong on the desk of every person who is serious about what he reads and about what he writes.The Craft of Research, 2nd edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Overview

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Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Review

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Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) ReviewMost books on how to write better English are pretty near to useless. Many of them scare you into worrying that you might use "which" when you should use "that" (never mind that an extra "which" never caused any reader the smallest bit of confusion). Others demand that you strive for "clarity" or "brevity" or "coherence"--but then somehow never provide any useful advice on just how, exactly, to do so.
Joseph Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace is an exception. It is the only truly useful book on English prose style that I have ever found. Even Strunk and White cannot compete with the quality of the advice that Williams gives. Perhaps more important, the advice that Williams gives can be used. As Williams puts it, his aim is to go "beyond platitudes." Advice like "'Be clear' is like telling me to 'Hit the ball squarely.' I know that. What I don't know is how to do it." Williams tells us how to do it.
Williams's advice is particularly useful because it is reader based. Most books on style are rule-based: follow these rules and you will be a good writer. Williams recognizes that clear writing is writing that makes the reader feel clear about what he or she is reading. This difference in orientation makes Williams's advice much more profound: he has a theory of why the rules are what they are (and what to do when the rules conflict) that books that focus on rules alone lack.
His advice starts at the level of the sentence. Williams believes that readers find sentences easy to read and understand when the logic of the thought follows the logic of the sentence: the subjects of sentences should be the actors, and the verbs of the sentence should be the crucial actions. The beginning of a sentence should look back and connect the reader with the ideas that have been mentioned before. The end of the sentence should look forward, and is the place to put new ideas and new information.
His advice continues at the level of the paragraph. The sentences that make up a paragraph should have consistent topics. New topics and new themes should be found at the end of a paragraph's introductory sentence (or sentences). Readers will find a paragraph to be coherent if it has one single articulate summary sentence, which is almost always found either at the end of the paragraph or as the last of the paragraph's introductory sentences.
His advice concludes with four chapters on being concise, on figuring out the appropriate length, on being elegant, and on using constructions that do not jar the reader. I think that these last four chapters are less successful than the other chapters of the book. They contain much sound advice. But the argument of the book becomes more diffuse. The first six chapters present and illustrate overarching organizing principles for achieving clarity, coherence, and cohesion. The last four chapters present long lists of things to try to do. (However, the fangs-bared attack on "pop grammarians" found in the last chapter is fun to read.)
So, gentle reader, if you want to become a better writer of English, go buy and work through this book. I, at least, have never found a better.Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Overview

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A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Review

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A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) ReviewA must have for all college and graduate students. Turabian answers all questions regarding proper citation, organization, and formatting. The only downside is that research has changed dramatically since this issue was published and the book is not too helpful in dealing with electronic/internet resources.A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Overview

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The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure Review

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The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure ReviewI personally love this book and find it to be much more interesting, and in some ways informative, than a similar book I have which is a bit more clinical in its approach. It's full of personal anecdotes and lots of advice that I enjoyed. And why should anyone get mad just because the two white, male professors said they have not noticed any discrimination against women in their fields? They don't say there isn't any, and indeed, give some statistics and information to say there probably *is* discrimination, but of a more covert manner than in the past. This book has a chapter that my other book doesn't on counteroffers and moving around in academia, how to negotiate family and the 'two-body' problem, and other more intimate advice than some other books give. The authors seem to recognize that academics is not all about publishing, teaching, and service. It involves many other aspects of your life, and they touch on them. That said, a 3-hour chat with 3 of your own professors may be just as informative as this book, but the problem is getting your professors to sit down and have that chat with you! Here you get those 3 hours for a low price and can consult them later. I like the fact that these 3 don't hold themselves up as ultimate authorities, but simply as 3 different viewpoints of an academic life.The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure Overview

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The Craft of Research, Third Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Review

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The Craft of Research, Third Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) ReviewAlthough there are many books on writing research or term papers, I have not found anything else which brings together material on planning, reasoning and writing the research paper as well as this book. Ignore any reviewers who make this book out to be a simplistic text. It is an excellent work on well reasoned writing that even most graduate students can benefit greatly from reading. As a professor of a graduate class on Research and Writing, I have recommended and required this book for several years. The book guides the reader from an idea of a topic, to defining a question, to formulating the conceptually signifcant research problem. It briefly covers finding, evaluating and using primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Then a major portion of the book is devoted to understanding effective reasoning in the writing process. This is based quite a bit on professor Stephen Toulmin's practical approach to effective reasoning and argumentation. The Craft of Research diagrams and explains claims, reasons, evidence and warrants. It has detailed illustrations of warrants and when to use them, as well as how to challenge them. The book has other sections on organizing, drafting,and revising a paper. It also has a chapter on communicating information visually using tables, graphs and charts. Rather than focusing on the simple mechanics or obvious steps in writing a serious research paper, this book concentrates on the more difficult tasks of clearly defining the conceptual problem and addressing it with in depth, effective reasoning.The Craft of Research, Third Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Overview

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A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Review

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A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) ReviewThe 7th edition of Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers features significant new material, a more user-friendly arrangement, much-needed rules for online resources, and an eye-friendly, two-tone typeset format.
Editors Booth, Colomb, and Williams have adapted material from their The Craft of Research and inserted it as Part I of the 7th edition. Researchers now get both a style guide and a research guide in one book.
The three-part format for the 7th edition also makes it easier to navigate. Part I is the new research guide; Part II is the rules for source citation; Part III is the style guide. In the 6th edition, the first chapter was a guide to the parts of a research paper which then had to be compared to the formats and sample layouts in the last chapter. The new edition combines all this material together in Appendix A along with instructions that are updated to reflect common word processor settings. And the index at the back of the volume now references items by page number rather than chapter and section, a great improvement in my opinion.
The 7th edition brings Turabian up-to-date by including rules and examples for citing online sources. Part II also separates the instructions for notes/bibliography style from the instructions for parenthetical/reference list style. What had been a completely separate chapter for citing public documents is now helpfully included with the rest of the citation rules. Part II of edition 7 now includes over 100 pages of citation examples compared to the 26 pages in chapter 11 of the 6th edition.
One weakness that is not corrected in the new edition is that Turabian's official stance for encyclopedias and other reference works is still that they should only be cited in notes. (17.5.3, p.191) Nothing acknowledges the difficulties of citing scholarly encyclopedia or dictionary references where signed articles are the norm. One can, however, adapt the instructions for edited collections on p.179 to sufficiently cite academic reference works.
Finally, the blue-and-black typesetting makes it much easier to distinguish in-text examples and to move one's eye from section to section.
It is fitting that the 7th edition has been published on the 20th anniversary of Kate Turabian's death. The many improvements in this edition will ensure its place on student bookshelves for years to come.A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Overview

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