Writing Social Work.

Witkin, Stanley L.

I am sitting on a hard wooden chair with a small round seat. My laptop computer sits stoically in front of me on a smooth wooden table scattered with papers and diskettes. Although it is June the temperature gauge just outside my large window reads 8 degrees centigrade (about 45 degrees Fahrenheit). I watch a large black and white magpie hop around in front of a red wooden building with a metal roof that faces the window. The building is the "sauna house" of the University of Lapland. I have returned to Finland to participate in another international summer school (see Witkin, 1999).

I am feeling restless, fighting with myself to stay at the computer and continue working on this editorial. It is due soon after I return to the United States, and I would like to have it mostly completed while I am here. I remind myself that I love to write, at least some of the time. Like when I have just finished a writing project and the exquisite pain of searching for the "right" words and the talking-to-myself struggle to stay focused are memories. I am also thinking about whether what I am writing now -- these words--can be part of the editorial. After all, I say to myself, part of this issue of Social Work is about writing, and I am writing about writing.

Maybe I am just trying to write my way into this editorial. It is not that I lack ideas; in fact, the opposite is true. My struggle is how to express and organize them, to make them coherent and interesting--within a small number of pages. There are infinite ways to write about writing. Yet each beginning, each formulation, points me in a different direction--toward certain conceptions and understandings and away from others. Which ones will be enacted through my writing? Which will be given form, and which will remain in the ethereal world of thought? Can I even know what these ideas are until I write them down? (I am reminded of Lamott's [1994] comment that "Very few writers know what they are doing until they've done it" [p. 22]). These are big questions for a little essay.

At the same time, I am excited about introducing alternative writing formats into Social Work. For a profession that depends so heavily on writing, this topic gets little attention. The stylistic and structural requirements of our journals are rarely questioned or examined in relation to our professional goals. But the way we write is important, very important to how we learn and what we know. What follows are some of my thoughts on this subject.

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Writing Science [1]

By the 17th century there came to be a distinction between literary and scientific forms of writing. [2] The former, associated with the arts, culture, and humanities, was concerned with language itself, how it might be used to express, explore, analyze, and create. For science, however, language simply was a vehicle for recording the regularities of nature and the methods for producing those regularities. By and large, academic and professional journals, including Social Work, have adopted the writing format developed for scientific writing. [3]

Writing science (or research) requires adherence to a prescribed structure that looks something like the following: statement of the problem, literature review, method, results, and discussion. This structure both reflects various assumptions about knowledge and serves the needs of certain segments of the scientific community. For example, following this structure gives texts an aura of authority, equating particular accounts of the world as "reality." It also keeps contributors in line. "One gets published by conforming to the literary style of a discipline-presenting argument in a way that adheres to literary canons (e.g., paying obeisance to those given high status, using its referencing style, and methodologies, presenting findings, beginnings." [4]

Science writing assumes that language reflects the world as observed by the researcher. Writing is largely passive, an objective recording of activities and events. As Bazerman put it, "To write science is commonly thought not to write at all, just simply to record the natural facts." [5] Literary merit is not considered important. In fact, concern with issues of style is considered tangential or even worse, as contributing to subjectivity or bias. Science is a literary genre that denies its own "literariness."

The writing format developed for describing experiments is the paragon of scientific writing. This powerful literary genre evolved over the past three and a half centuries following the publication of the first scientific journals. [6] A current expression of this genre--and the most common in social work journals--is the style developed by the American Psychological Association (aka "APA style"). To my knowledge, this style of writing is taught in most social work programs in the United States as the proper way to write about the weighty subjects we address. Why would social work adopt a writing style developed for the reporting of psychological research? I suspect it had something to do with the profession's perennial quest to be accorded the recognition and status of science-based professions like psychology and psychiatry. Nevertheless, as a variant of scientific writing, some characteristics of APA style should concern social workers.

APA Style [7]

APA style tends to create what Billig calls "depopulated texts"--that is, texts devoid both of authors or "subjects." [8] Little is known about authors other than their name, degrees, and professional affiliations. Similarly, research subjects are presented in scant detail. We know little about them as people. And when they are described, it is not in their own words, but in the language of theory or methodology. [9]

A presumed hallmark of scientific writing is its objectivity. Its offshoot, neutrality, is a value to which authors are expected to adhere. But as a cultural activity, writing always expresses values. There simply are no "pure" ways of representing the world. Our choice of words, emphases, or literary tropes tends to generate one picture, whereas other, but equally legitimate, choices might generate a different picture. This false sense of neutrality is compounded by the identification of some areas of ethical concern such as gender bias, but silence on others, for example, treating people as objects. [10]

For those interested in alternative forms of writing or nonpositivist forms of knowledge, APA style acts as a gatekeeper, discouraging their participation or "marginalizing" their contributions. [11] I suspect that for many practitioners, the challenge of fitting their ideas into the procrustean bed of APA style keeps them from ever putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Given the range and complexity of issues addressed by our profession, as well as our value framework, such a position seems ill-advised.

Postmodern Challenges

Interest in alternative forms of writing coincides with the emergence of the postmodern critique of Western enlightenment thinking. Previously unassailable notions such as progress, objectivity, and rationality have all been subject to critique--"unpacked" and reassembled as historical and cultural expressions. As applied to writing, particularly professional and scientific writing, language as a true representation of objective reality now competes with an understanding of language as constitutive of reality. According to this latter position, how we write directs attention to certain things and not others and favors certain conceptions, viewpoints, and interpretations over others. As Billig noted, "Writing practices are not merely means to persuade readers of "facts," but those "facts," of which the readers are to be persuaded, are themselves constituted through writing." [12]

How we write not only influences what we know but how we know. [13] Writers, whether scientific or not, use various rhetorical and literary devices, such as forms of argument, metaphors, and the like to support their positions. In this sense writing is a form of practice and inquiry. Practitioners are beginning to recognize these aspects of writing and are using them as useful adjuncts to their work. [14]

If writing is a form of inquiry, then alternate forms of writing are like different methodologies in their ability to generate different social realities. The various uses of language, as Laurel Richardson notes, are "competing ways of giving meaning and of organizing the world [making] language a site of exploration, struggle." [15] Thus, through our writing practices social workers participate in this generation, exploration, and struggle. Do these practices express the profession's values and aims? If they did, then the people who populated our texts would be fully human, social beings. Individuals, groups, organizations, and communities would be sites of possibilities--for change, growth, and transformation. As much as possible, our language would be widely accessible and our writing formats sufficiently varied so that a broad range of people could participate in our discourses. Our writing would be a vehicle for the pursuit of cherished values such as human rights and social justice. It would be critica l and reflexive, questioning domination including the authority of authors. Some of these qualities are illustrated in the articles, practice update, commentaries, and letters included in this issue.

A Glimpse at Some Alternatives

Four articles solicited for this issue--by Rose, Weick, Sternbach, and Donahue--represent, more or less, literary styles typically not seen in professional, academic journals: personal essay (Rose and Weick), memoir (Sternbach), and autoethnography (Donahue). In addition, an atypical article by Kanuha, although more representative of a standard academic format, displays features of these styles.

Essay

According to my Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, an essay is a literary composition on a particular theme or subject. It tends to be written in ordinary language and is "generally analytic, speculative, or interpretative." From this perspective, the three styles noted above can be viewed as variants on the essay.

Essays, as Goldstein (1993) reminds us, have a long history in social work, including works by such notables as Mary Richmond and Grace Coyle. Writing essays stimulates thinking and expands conceptual and literary boundaries. "This literary form awakens our critical and reflective thinking about essentially ambiguous, personal, or social issues. It encourages the use of imagery, metaphor, and other elements of style that may capture qualities of human circumstances in play outside the margins of scientific discourse" (Goldstein, p. 441).

Personal Essay. Compared with the essay, the personal essay is more intimate. "The essayist gives you his thoughts, and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them" (Smith, cited in Lopate, 1994, pp. xliii-xliv). Personal disclosures form the basis of a relationship between authors and readers (Lopate, 1994). This is not dispassionate reporting from invisible authors, but a narrative in which the authorial presence is integral to the story being told. Rose tells us about how his encounter with a young, defiant client generated an epiphany that led him to question the relevance of his professional education. We learn from Kanuha about the relationship between "a life experience of being multiply stigmatized" (p. 441) and her choice of a dissertation topic. Weick discusses the parallels between women as caretakers and the development of the social work profession in a way that is intertwined with her own socialization as a woman. She is not outside of the text, but an intimate part of it. Indeed, when she talks about the struggles of the profession to be heard, you sense that she also is talking about herself.

Memoir. The memoir is a record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation (Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1996). Although autobiographical, the memoir tends to be more limited in scope than an autobiography, usually focusing on particular events or themes. "The memoirist both tells the story and muses upon it, trying to unravel what it means in light of her current knowledge" (Barrington, 1997, p. 20). Thus, Sternbach shares with us his experience of working in a men s maximum-security prison while reflecting on his experience and its effect on his present-day professional practice.

Kanuha reflects on her experience of conducting her dissertation research as both an insider (lesbian woman of color) and outsider (researcher). This process of reflection and meaning making benefits not only the author, but also

the readers. Commenting about how his students profited from reading memoirs, noted author Jay Parini (1998) wrote, "They are learning quite explicitly how to construct a self, how to navigate the world, and--perhaps most usefully--how to gain some purchase on the world through the medium of language" (p. A40). Such lessons are no less important for social workers than English majors.

Autoethnography. An autoethnography is "a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context" (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p. 9). While focusing on the personal experience of the writer, it communicates about social and cultural contexts. One use of autoethnography, as illustrated in the essay by Donahue, is to compare lived experience against established knowledge. By doing so, autoethnographers reveal the limitations of such knowledge while providing an alternative representation. For example, Tillmann-Healy (1996) in her moving autoethnography about her ongoing struggle with bulimia, noted that the focus (of the literature) on "curing the disease" although admirable, "obscures the emotional intensity of bulimia and fails to help us understand what bulimia means to those who live with it every day and what it says about our culture" (p. 80). Similarly, Donahue helps us understand what struggling with debilitating depression means and how that struggle can be exacerbated by the conflicting messages of those espousing different causal theories and intervention approaches.

Commonalities

Despite the differing emphases of these literary styles, the essays share certain features, which I call author visibility, striving for authenticity, and connection and mutuality. Although the latter two features are not integral to these literary styles, I wonder if an authorial presence, use of the personal voice, and flexibility of expression invite the articulation of such fundamental values and beliefs.

The Visible Author

Relative to the standard academic article, where our only knowledge of authors is their academic or agency affiliation, the authors of these essays are highly visible and "exposed." They are real, "flesh and blood" people writing openly from their histories, social contexts, and experience. Ideas and lives are intertwined. Such disclosure is risky, yet this risk taking generates the rich, human context that gives these ideas their verisimilitude. Thus, we read about the 24-four-year-old Stephen Rose "white, recently married, middle-class, and the proud possessor of a quite new MSW" as he becomes painfully aware of his unwitting participation in a system of professional domination through the "ownership of meaning of another person's experience through the delegated power to interpret it" (p. 404). We learn of the family and personal influences on Ann Weick's decision to become a social worker, her brave disclosure that this "inclination toward social work was entirely conventional" and of her journey toward t he realization that her "first voice"--the voice of women--has been suppressed despite its being "the essential voice of social work" (p. 399) We "hear" Valli Kanuha's struggle to maintain an analytical stance when interviewing people whose "deeply personal and oftentimes painful life histories.. . mirrored many of my own experiences as a young lesbian coming of age in the 1950s" (p. 442). We enter with Jack Sternbach, the maximum security Foothills Correctional Institution where the hippie-looking professor's "arrogance was matched only by my ignorance, and both were balanced by my innocence" (p. 413). We follow him through his sometimes scary and ultimately enlightening encounters with inmates that taught him "about manhood that shook and shaped me then and provided the ground for much of my subsequent life work and personal development" (p. 414). We accompany Anne Donahue as she moves painfully toward an all-encompassing and immobilizing depression. "What is the whirlpool sucking at me? Fear of losing all control of my mind, instantly. I'm drowning" (p. 443). And we get a sense of the consequences of our theoretical debates when they leave out the people whose conditions they are attempting to explain.

Striving for Authenticity

All five authors address and endeavor to live what I would call an authentic life: integrating deeply held personal beliefs with professional ones, or, in the case of Donahue, having those beliefs respected by professionals. ("I may have been suffering from severe, recurrent depression, but I had life values and goals that were my right to have" p. 434). In each case this striving has led to important life changes. For Donahue it has meant going public with her story and advocating for laws that treat people burdened with psychiatric labels first and foremost as human beings. For Kanuha, too, it has meant writing about her personal--professional struggles and proposing "more reflexive, multimethod approaches for the study of social problems." For Rose it has meant exposing oppressive social arrangements and generating situations in which others could define their own lives. For Weick it meant understanding that we will never be able to assert our identity if we continue to do so with a borrowed voice. Rather, we must learn to speak openly in our own voice--the caretaking voice of passion, commitment, dedication, and vision. For Sternbach it meant integrating the lessons he learned at Foothills into his life and psychotherapy practice with men.

Connection and Mutuality

The necessity of relational connection and mutuality resonates throughout the essays. Sternbach states it most directly, "What I have to offer others has little value unless it is embedded in mutuality" (p. 417). Weick relates these qualities to women's use of their first voice: "In these times, conversation invariably is connected in some obvious and deep way with human relationships" (p. 399). For Rose, it is part of his epiphany, "Somehow, in this crucible, I began to identify and experience validity and its corollary, authentic recognition in mutually produced relationships (p. 404).

Kanuha's identification as an "insider" who has intimate familiarity with the experiences of her research participants is integral to the information her inquiry generates. "The degree and kinds of shared laughter, unfinished phrases, or specific terminology represented the 'knowing' and familiar references that characterize interactions between those who share cultural ways that are profoundly ingrained" (pp. 442-443). Finally, for Donahue it is an indispensable part of the helping process: "Whether medication or talk therapy or both; whether peer intervention and recovery or self-empowerment--all become pointless if not within a context of understanding of the continuum of the mediating intellect and the deeply personal differences of choices and values, and of the lived experience of immobilizing anguish" (p. 437).

As you can tell, I have learned much from these essays. I hope you do as well. Writing essays will not solve our problems nor will they replace other forms of inquiry. But I do believe that expanding our writing practices to include essays and other literary styles can help the social work community "to understand itself, converse well, and make choices" (Rosen, cited in Denzin, 1997). Let us not so privilege one literary format that the profession, as Ann Weick eloquently writes, "let slip through its fingers the language that fills its veins with the fullest expression of human experiences and that most essentially gives social work its distinctive character as a profession" (p. 400).

Endnotes

(1.) Readers will note that I do not use the typical referencing style of the journal in this section of the editorial. I do this to make a point about the influence of stylistic conventions (see note 7).

(2.) See L. Richardson, Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990).

(3.) There are some notable exceptions in social work. For example, the journal Narratives, whose founding editor was Sonia Abels, has been a leader in publishing alternative forms of writing. Also, in the past few years, the journal Families in Society, under the editorship of Howard Goldstein, has published several essays.

(4.) See B. Agger, Reading Science: A Literary, Political, and Sociological Analysis (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1989).

(5.) See C. Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, P. 14).

(6.) See Bazerman, supra, for a history of the experimental article.

(7.) APA style discourages the use of endnotes as seen here. Footnotes or endnotes facilitate authors' reflection on their ideas and "offer the possibility of creating parallel text" (D. Vipond, "Problems with a Monolithic APA Style" [Comment], American Psychologist, 51[1996]: 653).

(8.) See M. Billig, "Repopulating Social Psychology: A Revised Version of Events," in Reconstructing the Psychological Subject (1998, pp. 126-152), eds. B. Bayer & J. Shotter (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications).

(9.) I am not advocating that we compromise confidentiality, and I doubt whether this concern has much to do with the lack of translation of information about clients or research participants. There are ways we can describe people without revealing their identities. Ironically, the hiding of information may inadvertently foster the notion of subject or client as a stigmatized identity.

(10.) See G. S. Budge & B. Katz, "Constructing Psychological Knowledge: Reflections on Science, Scientists, and Epistemology in the APA Publications Manual," Theory & Psychology, 5[1995]: 217-231.

(11.) I am not referring only to quantitative approaches, as "nonquantitative approaches often proceed in much the same way without relying explicitly on techniques of statistical inference. At issue is not quantification per se but the way that text ... establishes its epistemological authority (see Agger, supra at note 4, p. 4).

(12.) See Billig, supra at note 8, p. 128.

(13.) I have found the writings of Laurel Richardson on this topic to be particularly illuminating. See, for example, note 2, and "Writing: A Method of Inquiry," in Handbook of Qualitative Research (1994, pp. 516-529; 2nd ed., 2000, pp. 923-948), eds. N. K Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications).

(14.) For example, see B. A. Esterling, L. L'Abate, E. J. Murray, & J. W. Pennebaker, "Empirical Foundations for Writing in Prevention and Psychotherapy: Mental and Physical Health Outcomes," Clinical Psychology Review, 19[1999]: 79-96.

(15.) Richardson, 1994, supra at note 12, p. 518.

References

Barrington, J. (1997). Writing the memoir. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press.

Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretive ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Goldstein, H. (1993). Writing to be read: The place of the essay in social work literature. Families in Society, 74, 441-446.

Lamott, A. (1994). Bird by bird. New York: Doubleday.

Lopate, p. (1994). Introduction. In P. Lopate (Ed.), The art of the personal essay. New York: Doubleday.

Parini, J. (1998, July 10). The memoir versus the novel in a time of transition. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A40.

Reed-Danahay, D. E. (1997). Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social. Oxford: Berg.

Tillmann-Healy, L. M. (1996). A secret life in a culture of thinness: Reflections on body, food, and bulimia. In C. Ellis & A. P. Bochner (Eds.), Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing (pp. 76-108). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Witkin, S. L. (1999). Letter from Lapland. Social Work, 44, 413-415.