Joyce C. Steward and Marjorie Smelstor’s textbook, Writing in the Social Sciences, (Scott, Foresman: 1984) presents a promising title but a disappointing product. When I saw the title, I expected to find material in the text which would help students in the social sciences understand better their discipline’s processes of intellectual investigation and, more importantly, the connection between those processes and the discipline’s characteristic types of written texts. I found none of that. Instead, I found a text which takes a “clean-hands” approach to teaching writing in the social sciences, presenting some interesting readings but choosing not to become actively involved in actual instruction.

I was so enticed by Steward and Smelstor’s title because there exists a crying need—which I believe will grow in coming years—for good, theory-based, writing-in-the-disciplines textbooks. The writing-across-the-curriculum movement has burgeoned forth in almost full blossom, giving rise to programs and courses in major public and private universities, smaller four year institutions, community colleges, and even high schools. Although the organization and implementation of these programs vary from school to school, the programs nearly always favor one of two major theoretical approaches. Laurence Peters calls them the “practical model of language” and the “language-as-exploratory tool” model.¹ Peters errs by concentrating so strongly on “forms and conventions” in defining these approaches. As I have seen them in practice, both approaches proceed not from assumptions about forms and conventions, but instead from assumptions about the kind of cognitive/rhetorical framework which underlies the instruction. What Peters calls the “practical model,” I call the “discipline-specific” approach: students are taught their discipline’s methods of thinking and generating ideas for writing, its patterns for structuring written texts, and its characteristic “ways of speaking,” including diction and syntax.² What Peters calls the "language-as-exploratory tool” model, I call the “generalist” approach: students in all disciplines are taught that composing is a multi-step, recursive cognitive process which nearly always emanates from self-expressive thinking and writing. As Helen Isaacson hinted in a review in volume three of this journal two years ago, most writing-across-the-curriculum texts cater to the second, the generalist approach. The discipline-specific approach is served by a “growing but still inadequate group of texts.”⁴

What troubles me about the Steward and Smelstor text is that it can’t decide whether it’s fish or fowl, and it doesn’t accommodate either approach very well. The authors claim that, “This collection, drawn from the work of both professionals and other students, can help your students discover ideas and patterns, content and techniques to apply in their own writing.” I don’t see how. The book does offer reading selections which represent part of the social sciences’ ways of thinking and writing, but it provides little concrete help to students who want to think and write in the ways that their discipline accepts. It presents some ideas about cognitive processes of composing, exemplary of the generalist approach, but its presentation of them is often simplistic and naive.

Writing in the Social Sciences contains many essays which don’t usually get anthologized (although it, too, has Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” which, evidently, no reader of any kind can go to press without). Following each essay are “Points for Discussion” and “Suggestions for Writing.” The book is divided into four major sections: “About Writing,” “Writing for Many Purposes,” “Longer Projects,” and “Tools for the Social Science Writer.” The second section, “Writing for Many Purposes,” is divided into chapters according to the purpose of the pieces: “Papers That Investigate and Report,” “Papers That Clarify and Discuss Abstractions,” “Papers That Analyze Events and Their Causes,” “Papers That Argue and Persuade,” and “Papers That Review and Analyze Reading.” The “Papers That Review and Analyze Reading” and the “Papers of Extended Research” in the “Longer Projects” section do serve a discipline-specific approach. The former comprise actual examples of the abstract, the book review, the annotated bibliography, and the literature review—all accepted and characteristic forms of social science writing. The latter are two students’ research papers, one from a psychology class and one from an anthropology class. The final section of the book, "Tools for the Social Science Writer,” contains an extremely thorough “guide to reference materials in the social sciences.”

But too many of the readings represent discourses on the social sciences—"a sociologist calls for more study” on this subject, “sociological research could gain fresh insights” from that subject. Most of the readings are selections from books or from the popular press, and too few represent the products of actual social science research—the kind of writing most practicing social scientists do. Moreover, those readings which do report actual investigations are not accompanied by any suggestions on how to conduct and write up such research. For example, William Graybeal’s essay from Today’s Education entitled “How Changes in Enrollment Will Affect Higher Education” bases its predictions on extensively charted demographic data describing potential school populations. But when the reader gets to the “Suggestions for Writing” which follow this essay, she receives the following directions:

This is followed by a list of ten possible research questions, but there is absolutely no suggestion of which questions would require what methods and no instruction on any of the research methods themselves. It seems as though Steward and Smelstor assume that students of the social sciences already know how to conduct research and that they will be able to figure out how to write it up just by reading the essays in this text. I think it’s unwise to separate conceptually the processes of investigation and reportage—I believe they are cognitively and rhetorically linked. Writing in the Social Sciences, therefore, does little to serve the discipline-specific approach. It tactily acknowledges that the approach exists, but it contributes little to actual instruction within it.

The book’s contribution to a generalist approach is also minimal. Like many textbooks on the market, it treats “the writing process” as a singular entity and fails to acknowledge explicitly that successful writing processes can differ from writer to writer. Its seven-page chapter on composing processes, entitled “You as a Writer,” provides only scant advice on how to use invention heuristics, and although the chapter claims that revision falls into several steps and occurs at various times,” nonetheless it advises that “primarily, revision requires that you check the organization of your paper and then move to polishing the presentation,” an admonition which really doesn’t suggest that revising writers might want to be sure they have thought through and communicated their ideas clearly. The chapter does have some good ideas on potential audiences, but these ideas would benefit from some actual examples of audience analysis and some extended discussion of audience accommodation strategies.

The chapter which follows “You as a Writer” is called “Professionals Talk About Writing.” I found it intimidating rather than helpful. Here we get “Advice from Barabara Tuchman” which makes writing sound solipsistic and unteachable. We also get “Timeless Rules from George Orwell” and “Warnings and Advice” from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

The “Points for Discussion” and “Suggestions for Writing” in Writing in the Social Sciences represent what I consider to be liabilities of traditional composition instruction. There is little indication of what the authors hope students will accomplish from their discussions of the texts, and many of the "points” are actually mini-lessions from the current-traditional paradigm: exercises on lexical cohesion and structural analyses of arguments, for example. The “Suggestions for Writing” too often strike me as make-work projects—writing just for the sake of writing, without any connection to actual research and study a novice in the social sciences might be doing.

I have not tried to use Writing in the Social Sciences with students. I have, however, been working for the past year with professors in a School of Social Work, trying to help them devise productive ways to assign and evaluate writing for their upper-division students. They have convinced me that they want instruction in real writing, in the types of rhetorical invention, arrangement, and style characteristic of their discipline. Because I believe in their validity, I have tried to suggest materials and methods from both the generalist and the discipline-specific approaches. I don’t think Writing in the Social Sciences is the answer.