@book{sennett2009richard,
  abstract = {I want next, therefore, to talk about the craft of social writing. What I'm going to describe to you are issues drawn from my own experience - I certainly would not hold myself up as a shining example of writing well, and certainly there are many other solutions to the problems of expressive writing than those I've found. But the problems themselves, I would claim, are generic to socially minded literature. (...)

Today, many social scientists are menaced by exclusion from this public realm, due to their feeble powers of expression. This feebleness is not simply a personal failing. The history of academic institutions seeking to protect their freedom, the specialization and bureaucratization of knowledge, are general sources of intellectual isolation; the feebleness of shared intelligence is but one tangible result. The depth of what researchers know becomes incommunicable, due to a lack of expressive tools; the public is left with the husks, the surfaces of knowledge.

All writing is political just in the way a writer relates to readers. I've noted with dismay that when social scientists attempt to address the general public, they tend to survey and to simplify; that is, to talk down; that is, to condescend. The reader is excluded from being a critical partner in the writer's own thinking - whereas da las Casas, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville treated their readers more as equals. The politics of talking down to the reader evinces also an error in the understanding of writing itself. (...)

Life histories and collective history do not possess this literary property. Individual life-histories are often incoherent, a jig-saw of parts which do not fit together; collective histories may not accumulate in value. To give you an example of each: Many of the workers I've interviewed in the new economy have short-term jobs rather than long-term careers, obliged to change what they do and where they do it by global forces beyond their control. Though they work very hard they lack a coherent narrative about the work itself. Lack of accumulated meaning is something I noted most recently in interviewing go-go financial managers in New York; the collapse of firms like Long-Term Capital Management a decade ago or the bursting of the dot-com bubble a few years after has made little impress on these managers, their behavior neither conditioned nor conditioned by prior disasters - the collective history did not accumulate in value. (...)

I have tried to show, through these techniques of voicing, narrating, stimulating curiosity, and symbol-making, how the writing of social literature is a craft. As in any other craft, inspiration is no guide, nor in this particular craft will humanistic empathy suffice. The social writers I particularly admire - Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau - write quite differently from each other, yet all share an essential ethos of craftsmanship. All established a set of practices for their prose, but these practices evolved in the course of their careers; they could be thus make discoveries, rather than just demonstrate skill. All craftsmanship should have that aspiration; good technique is not a fixed, closed system. },
  address = {Münster},
  author = {Sennett, Richard},
  editor = {Stiftung, Gerda Henkel},
  interhash = {ed9dbce5bfb7338ee6ec5ccb668ac152},
  intrahash = {0fdbf58c1bb776925a15ab48a55668cb},
  isbn = {9783930454938 3930454939},
  publisher = {Rhema},
  refid = {428012172},
  title = {Richard Sennett : How I Write: Sociology As Literature. Verleihung des Gerda Henkel Preises 2008. Gerda Henkel Vorlesung},
  url = {http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=3930454939},
  year = 2009
}

@electronic{lehn:2011,
  abstract = {Vielen Studenten fällt es schwer, wissenschaftliche Texte zu verfassen. Helfen können Schreibzentren, wie sie an Amerikas Hochschulen längst üblich sind. In Deutschland gibt es davon aber erst wenige. },
  author = {vom Lehn, Birgitta},
  day = 11,
  interhash = {b324fba23daf525cb67acd82139d4061},
  intrahash = {d78686e90c2fd7fd5f4673d6bf81b0d6},
  journal = {Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung},
  month = {01},
  title = {Schreibberatung für Studenten: Endlich schreiben lernen},
  url = {http://www.faz.net/aktuell/beruf-chance/campus/schreibberatung-fuer-studenten-endlich-schreiben-lernen-11593828.html},
  year = 2011
}