"Writing for Social Scientists"

Howard S. Becker, "Writing for Social Scientisits", 1986, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
「All the tired metaphors once lived. As metaphors age, they lose their force from sheer repetition, so that they take up space but contribute less than a plain, nonmetaphorical statement.」（p.87）「Later I decided that the stories were more important than the theories.」（p.106）「you learn to write from the world around you, both from what it forces on you and from what it makes available.」（p.107）→I am forced to write, and enabled to write by the world around me. Even the hardship on me has made my writing more fertile.「The world does push and sometimes it hurts to resist. But my story, I think, for all its historical and personal peculiarities, shows that the opposite is truer than most people think.」（p.107）→「The world does push and sometimes it hurts to resist.」（p.107）「intelectual life is a dialogue among people interested in the same topic.」（p.124）→I wish we could have "intelectual life" in school. I wonder if I could have been able to have such a life at any high school I have ever worked for.「It (=scholarly world: Kakuta) needs new ideas. But the old formats make it hard for a different idea to get a breath.」（p.130）「The more time you invest, the greater your return.」（p.131）「an organizational function of the classics: to symbolize solidarity among people in a field.」（p.137）「there is no sense trying to find the One Right Way to write what you have to say. Copying well-done work (especially its organization or format), however, is a wonderful way to find possible right ways.」（p.138）「The dialectic of constraint and opportunity that naive artists illustrate affects all of us as we write our dissertations, papers, and books. That dialectic suggests two questions: how we can use the literature effectively? How does the literature get in our way and prevent us from doing our best work?」（p.141）→「The dialectic of constraint and opportunity ... affects all of us as we write .... That dialectic suggests two questions: how we can use the literature effectively? How does the literature get in our way and prevent us from doing our best work?」（p.141） Constraint enables us to perform more swiftly and more effectively. Yet, it also hinders us from creating and organizing new ideas.「I didn't need to invent the concept; he had invented for me.」（p.143）→A beautiful statement: someone has invented some idea FOR ME.「I am always collecting such prefabricated parts for use in future argumants. Much of my reading is governed by a search for such useful modules.」（p.144）→This is the way I read.「I didn't know I needed the next module until I found it; then I couldn't do without it.」（p.145）「I also collect modules I have no present use for, when my intuition tells me I will eventually find the use.」（p.145）「I may not use these ideas in their original form. I may transform them in ways their parents wouldn't recognize or approve of, and interpret them in ways students of these thinkers will find incorrect. I will probably use them in contexts quite different from those in which they were first proposed, and fail to give due weight to theoretical exegeses which strive to discover the core meanings their inventors intended.」（p.145）「It cannot look its best playing opponent's game.」（p.147）→You play tennis? If you do, you know what he means. And he means it!「I had blundered onto, and then proceeded to ignore, a much larger and more interesting question: how do people difine all sorts of internal experiences?」（p.148）「I don't know how people can tell when they are letting the literature deform their argument. It is the classic dilemma of being trapped in the categories of your time and place. What you can do is recognize the dominant ideology (as I did at the time with respect to drug use), look for tis ideological component, and try to find a more neutral scientific stance toward the problem. You know you are on the right track when people tell you you are on the wrong track.」（p.149）「a serious scholar ought routinely to inspect competing ways of talking about the same subject matter. The feeling that you can't say what you mean in the language you are using will warn you that the literature is crowding you. It may take a long time to find out that this has happened to you, if you find out at all.」（p.149）「Use the literature, don't let it use you.」（p.149）