Readings in Methodology: African Perspectives

13. Writing in the Social Sciences: From Field Notes to Scientific Reports

13 Writing in the Social Sciences: From Field Notes to Scientific Reports* Alexandra Bidet and Erwan Le Méner The researcher in the social sciences never stops writing. To size up the activity of writing which continually accompanies research is to follow science to the place where it is developing. Writing is far from being a transparent tool,1 a simple mode of expression, which steps in only at the end of research to make the results public. Given that the sociologist or anthropologist spends the majority of his time writing notes, memos, transcriptions, articles, etc., it is remarkable that he is scarcely taught how to do so, and that he talks very little about it, as if his reports were like ripe fruit falling from the tree. Nevertheless, some practitioners are interested in the scriptural production in the social sciences. The works of Jack Goody (1979) throw some light on the coextensive character of science and writing. The interest of the famous anthropologist in the invention of the printing press led him to study the concrete modifications associated with the appearance of writing: what are the “powers” of writing which, for him, begin from the list or the table? What are the cognitive effects of these graphic inscriptions? The invention of the printing press appears at the beginning of the birth of a critical tradition: with the printing press, texts began to circulate in a crystallized, fixed form, freed from their authors and from the time of their formulation. No longer was it a matter of forms of knowledge constantly in movement as in the oral tradition, where they are also partially recreated at the same time as they are transmitted, but to a stable reference, provided to view, which can then be compared, examined, criticized: we can write other texts referring to them, and a critical discussion can be developed about them. “Powers of writing” depend on the very possibility of a systematic, reflexive, and cumulative knowledge. * We would like to thank Daniel Cefaï, Martin Giraudeau and Anne Laporte, for their meticulous rereading. 250 Readings in Methodology: African Perspectives Taking writing seriously encourages us to consider, after Charles Wright Mills (1959) and Howard S. Becker (1986) particularly, that to be trained (or train oneself) in research in social sciences, is to be trained (or train oneself) in the author’s craft. The insistence on the concept of craft indicates two things: the researcher produces mainly reports most often writings (Latour 2006); and writing is worked on, it assumes a constant effort, and not a preordered group of ingredients as in a recipe. Paying attention to the question of writing is thus to ensure a constant critical awakening, particular to “the diehard empiricism” (Schwartz 1990) of the social sciences. This does not suggest skepticism but, on the contrary, a concern for rigor and sociological imagination as to our formats of writing, our styles and our vocabularies. The first official report is, however, more unrefined, and could take away beginners’ feelings of guilt: writing does not come easily; few and far between are the sociologists who do not have difficulties with writing. It is often seen as a test, a jump– the “transition to writing”– more than as background work, inscribed in time and in a system of discovery. Can we hope to come to terms with writing? In this contribution, we assemble some main proposals to this end. It is a question of both flushing out the lures which hinder writing, make it intimidating and discouraging, and of making a list of “tricks of writing” already explored by researchers that the reader could then test and enrich in turn. Some False Ideas on the Subject of Writing These ideas consist in thinking of writing as the simple putting down in words of a thought which is already clear, or results of research developed previously. Writing is thought to be outside of the core of scientific activity, and its qualities are of little importance, no more than they are cultivated. Among the myths that harm our practices of writing, we find both that of writing as a “personal talent” or of “easy writing,” the belief in the existence of a “single good way to write” that the “best researchers” are thought to possess and that has only to be discovered. In all cases, it is the very nature of writing as work which is misunderstood. The myth of writing as an innate or superfluous ability If “everyone knows that sociologists...