Academic Writing Feels So Hard

Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists, now in its third edition, asks an interesting question: Why is academic writing so difficult in the first place?

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The answer, Becker argues, has less to do with individual talent or intelligence and everything to do with the social organization of academic life. Writing problems are not personal failings. They are built into the institutions we work in.

Becker opens with a story from his writing seminar. He asked students to describe how they wrote. One could only write on yellow, ruled, legal-size pads using a green felt-tip pen. Another had to clean the house first. A third needed to sharpen exactly twenty pencils.

Writers fear they cannot organize their thoughts, that the material will overwhelm them. And they fear that others will read what they produce and laugh — or, worse, conclude the writer is simply not smart enough.

The rituals serve a purpose. Writing in longhand, for instance, ensures that what you produce cannot be mistaken for a finished product. The built-in excuse protects you. But it also prevents you from getting work done.

The solution Becker proposes is disarmingly simple: write a terrible first draft.

Not a good draft. Not a passable draft. A terrible one. Write whatever comes into your head, as fast as you can. Don’t consult your notes. Don’t worry about organization. Don’t edit as you go. Just get words on the page.

You cannot organize what you have not yet written. The draft shows you what you actually think — not what you imagine you think. It reveals the choices you have already made through your research, reading, and thinking. Once those choices are visible, you can revise them.

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Becker’s second chapter explores a phenomenon every graduate student recognizes: the impulse to write in a way that sounds “classy.”

One of Becker’s students confessed that she preferred “resides at” over “lives at,” “surplus income” over “extra money,” and “third party labor” over “domestic help.” When Becker asked why, she gave a one-word answer: “classier.”

Graduate students, uncertain whether they yet belong to the academic tribe, adopt the stylistic markers they see around them. Complicated sentences. Abstract nouns. Passive constructions. They do this because they believe that difficult writing signals intelligence — and that plain writing signals the opposite.

The irony, of course, is that the reverse is often true. Clarity is harder to achieve than obscurity. Writing plainly requires you to know what you mean. Writing opaquely allows you to hide confusion behind impressive-sounding language.

Becker’s diagnosis is sociological, not psychological. The desire to sound classy is a response to hierarchy. Students are subordinates. Professors know more. The professors who sound smart are the ones who use words students don’t understand. Students imitate that style because they want to become the kind of people who sound smart.

But the strategy backfires. It produces writing that is harder to read, harder to edit, and ultimately harder to publish. Editors and reviewers may not reject a paper because it is badly written — but they will reject it because they cannot tell what it says.

Perhaps the most paralyzing belief in academic writing is the conviction that there is a single correct structure for any given paper. If you can just find the right way to organize the material, everything else will fall into place.

This is a dangerous fiction, Baker says.

Becker illustrates the problem with his own dissertation. He had studied Chicago public school teachers and their relations with students, parents, principals, and other teachers. He could organize the material by type of relationship — or by type of school. Both choices worked. Neither was perfect. The smallest descriptive units were the same either way.

The real difficulty is not choosing the “right” structure. It is accepted that there is no right structure. There are only workable structures, each with trade-offs.

It could be said that the practical implication here is to write the easiest part first. Write whatever you can. You will discover, once you have a draft, what your fragments are and how they might fit together. The alternative — trying to solve the organizational puzzle in your head before writing a word — is a recipe for paralysis.

Becker’s advice on editing is refreshingly unprogrammatic. There are no algorithms. There are only heuristics — rules of thumb that you learn by doing.

The core practice is simple: pay attention.

Read through your draft. For each word and phrase, ask: what happens if I remove this? If the meaning doesn’t change, take it out. If the sentence becomes clearer, take it out.

Becker provides examples from his own work. “It is important to make the steps of this theory explicit.” became “If we make the steps of this theory explicit, we can see how it works.” Twenty-three words became sixteen. The meaning became clearer. The argument became stronger.

• Active verbs matter. “Deviants were labeled,” hides the labeler. If labeling theory is about who labels whom and why, then the passive construction is not just bad style — it is bad theory. It misstates the argument.
• Concrete details matter. “There is a complex relation between X and Y” tells you nothing. “Teachers in slum schools expect principals to side with them against students” tells you something. You can build from concrete observations to general claims. You cannot build from general claims to a concrete understanding without examples.
• Tired metaphors should be cut. “Cutting edge,” “bottom line,” “fall between two stools” — these phrases no longer mean anything. They are dead wood. A living metaphor, like Goffman’s “cooling the mark out,” works because it is taken seriously. The comparison is sustained point by point, revealing something new about both the source and the target.

Pamela Richards, a sociologist who contributed a chapter to Becker’s book, describes the emotional reality of writing in a way that many readers will recognize.

She dreams that a trusted friend has read her draft and scrawled across every page: “This is absolutely the stupidest stuff you’ve ever written.” She dreams of writing like Lillian Hellman — elegant, powerful, in command. She wakes at 3 a.m. with the crystalline conviction that she is a fraud.

Writing is risky because it opens you to judgment. And judgment matters. Colleagues talk. Your work becomes part of your professional reputation. If people think you are sloppy or stupid, it affects your career.

The risk is not just external. It is internal. What if you sit down to write and discover that you cannot do it? What if the attempt reveals that you are not the person you claim to be?

The solution, Richards argues, is trust. You need readers who will respond appropriately to the stage your work is in — who will treat a first draft as a first draft, not as a final product. You need people who will tell you the truth, but who have seen you at your worst and haven’t given up on you.

For Richards, these trusted readers were often people from graduate school. They had seen her early attempts. They knew she could improve. Her success did not threaten them.

Trust is reciprocal. You read their drafts. They read yours. You build a network of mutual support. Without it, writing becomes an exercise in solitary fear.

Becker borrows a phrase from the computer industry: “getting it out the door.” Engineers and marketers have different standards. Marketers want it now. Engineers want it perfect. The tension is unresolvable.

Academics face the same tension. You can spend twenty years on a masterpiece — or you can publish regularly, accepting that your work is “good enough” rather than perfect.

Both choices have costs. The twenty-year book may never be finished. The “good enough” article may be forgotten. But the academic system rewards publication. Promotions, tenure, job offers — these depend on getting work out the door.

Recognize that you are choosing between competing goods. Neither choice is morally superior. Both are responses to the social organization of academic life.

The practical implication: find a balance that works for you. Set realistic deadlines. Show work to trusted readers. Accept that your writing will never be perfect — and that it doesn’t need to be.

Graduate students often feel terrorized by the literature. They worry that they have missed a crucial citation, that someone else has already said what they are trying to say, that their committee will ask “Which edition is that, Mr. Goffman?” and expose their ignorance.

Becker’s approach to the literature is pragmatic. Use it as a source of prefabricated parts. When you need a concept, borrow it. Simmel on subordination. Weber on secrecy. Hughes on master status. These are modules that have already been built. You don’t need to reinvent them.

But do not let the literature deform your argument. Becker’s study of marijuana use was shaped by the dominant question of his time: “Why do people do a weird thing like that?” He answered that question, and the answer was useful. But he missed a bigger question: “How do people learn to define their own internal experiences?”

The literature’s hegemony is real. The dominant approach to a topic seems natural. Your approach seems strange. You have to explain why you didn’t ask the questions everyone else asks. They don’t have to explain why they didn’t ask yours.

Becker’s advice: recognize the ideological component of the dominant approach. Look for a more neutral stance. When you find yourself unable to say what you mean in the language you’re using, you are being deformed. Write what you actually found.

Becker’s third edition includes a chapter on computers, but his real concern is the changing social organization of academic life.

When Becker began his career, there were about a thousand sociologists in the United States. Everyone reads everything. “Keeping up with the literature” was not the chore it later became.

Now there are tens of thousands of scholars. Journals proliferate. The pressure to publish has intensified. And citation counts have become a proxy for quality — a measure that, as Campbell’s Law predicts, has corrupted the process it monitors.

Titles have become longer, more formulaic, and more laden with variables and methods. Authors are trying to signal relevance to a casual reader flipping through a journal. The signal matters because citation counts matter. But longer titles do not actually increase citations.

The consequence: a formulaic style that rewards safety and conformity. Scholars in vulnerable career stages write what they see around them. Editors publish what they see. The cycle reinforces itself.

Becker’s experiment: He submitted an article on Goffman to a major journal. The referees thought it was interesting but said it didn’t “fit.” Not enough citations to the “Goffman literature.” Too informal. It was accepted by a smaller journal, Symbolic Interaction, instead.