Hi, this is [unknown], your disciplinary consultant for social sciences and in this video I am going to tell you about the writing process and discipline, so obviously I'm going to focus on the social sciences. And I will also try to give you a little bit of a sense of what I do as a scholar and what kind of writing I do. What is the process that I go through? What are the things that I like doing when I am writing myself? So, first of all, I think it is useful to define social sciences. What do I mean when I say social science? It is an umbrella term for a number of disciplines that examine basically human behavior, culture, societies. So the analytic unit of social sciences.is humans and the societies that they form. When it comes to the writing process, the writing process for all almost of these genres of social science also the disciplines of social sciences follow a similar pattern of pre-drafting, pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing that Denise also mentioned in her video. The part that as I would say, unique to social sciences would be some additional elements additional stages that generally go under the pre-drafting pre-writing stage which is, you are expected to develop a hypothesis. Then you are expected to do a literature review based on your hypothesis, your topic you should, you're expected to go out and look for other resources other people who wrote about this, the same topic. What is out there in terms of academic writing? And incorporate those in your writing. And, then the last stage is data analysis and Depending on discipline or on your discipline you might have different kinds of data, but you would be expected to, go out and do, some data analysis, collect your data and analyze your data. And, then there's going to be a stage of obviously revising and editing. And this part in here, the drafting/pre-writing part, these steps, actually also are a little bit more recursive. You work on a working hypothesis in the beginning, and then after developing a working hypothesis, you might find out that If after you for example collected your data it doesn't really match this so you will have to revise it. And, we'll just connect it here and then have a hypo, the second hypothesis or like a more developed hypothesis, at this point you might realize that. You might need more literature review, going back again to revising so, it can be a little bit similar to what the news talks about revising drafting again revising and so on and so forth, that part I would say is, pretty common in all kinds of writing. Again one unique thing about social sciences is that your data that I had mentioned earlier can be either in the form of quantitative date which is numbers survey results statistics or it can be qualitative data in the form of interviews maybe images videos based on. What kind of discipline that you're in. Say, for example, in economics and political science, you might be working with something like survey results analyzing those doing statistical analysis. And if you're, for example, a sociologist working in, in the popular culture images, you might be looking at some TV shows videos maybe YouTube videos and song. So, it kind of depends on your specific discipline within social sciences. I have a couple of tips to write like a social scientist. And, we can think about it as more generalized for any kind of discipline. But for, specifically for social science I would say it's really useful to first of all find a model text, an example of whatever you are trying to write like. Say if you're going to write a journal article in, sociology, go find a journal article in sociology. If you're trying to publish in that journal, find an article published in that journal, and see what kind of conventions, writing conventions it has. What kind of chapter subheadings that, that article has. What is the tone of the language like? So try to actually, analzye all of these elements of writing and try to replicate it in your own writing. And more generally is familiarize yourself with the specific discipline. So what kinds of questions does this discipline ask? What are the broader concerns of the discipline what does it actually, Try to understand, what are some of the methods that it uses and what does it accept as a, as an evidence? Say, for example for cultural anthropology you may have participant observation field notes and so on. And or analytical memos and then those can count as evidence and then you can use it as your data for that particular discipline but if you try to do the same thing for say economics that might not be valid evidence from the perspective of that particular discipline. The same thing for forms of writing, writing conventions citation practices what does your discipline accept, as the common citation practice or writing convenetions. Lastly I'd like to tell you a little bit about my own research, To this day I've written a master's thesis in political science, a doctoral dissertation in science and technology studies, several journal articles. Some book chapters and a number of papers when I was a student, obviously. The biggest project I have done in terms of both research and writing has been my dissertation project and as I was telling you a little bit about the data analysis. My data was mainly qualitative, it came from interviewing women of menopausal age and their doctors about their experiences, because my dissertation was about medicalization of menopause in Turkey, and I spent some time in hospitals, I observed doctor-patient interactions, I took some notes, read news stories about menopause and analyze all of these. So as the process goes, I spent a lot of time taking notes, then writing on analytical notes based on those notes. I transcribed interview's, I read and reread all the documents I've collected and I also made some analytical maps to visually help me to understand the data I have at hand. My, personally my favorite part was this whole process of analysis where I'm trying to reread and my documents and understand what is going on, what are the patterns that is occurring in here. My favorite part of the writing process was, was actually this analysis, revising, drafting the, the data part of my, my writing. So after the data analysis period, I wrote my findings, I wrote my ascertation and of course it involved a lot of revisions. And at that stage also it involved a lot of collaboration with, with people. In the case of my dissertation there was my advisor who was giving me feedback, and in the case of journal articles I wrote later on, I received comments from anonymous reviewers which helps your writing tremendously. It, it really is very useful to have somebody else with you working, give you comments about what are the things that you cannot see yourself, because you sometimes are so locked into your own world of writing. And another type of collaboration what I did, and really enjoyed, was I coauthored a book chapter with a friend of mine, a friend and colleague which worked with, we sent each other the parts that we wrote and discussed the parts that we were going to work on. And we tried to coordinate the, the manuscript that we wrote, which was also a very productive and I would say, a fun process of writing together. And in this slide actually, I know that you cannot read it very well, but you see the book that the chapter was published in, with a, just a little bit of hint of what we did at the beginning of the chapter. So, this is the writing process in social sciences and, the way I did it so far I've gave you a good idea about it and I will see you in the next videos.
