Written in a clear, humorous and entertaining style, this looks at why today's social scientists are writing so poorly. Michael Billig identifies the linguistic features of poor social scientific writing, as well as examining the impact of the current competitive 'capitalist' culture to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way that social scientists write.

1. Introduction; 2. Mass publication and academic life; 3. Learning to write badly; 4. Jargon, nouns and acronyms; 5. Turning people into things; 6. How to avoid saying who did it; 7. Some sociological things: governmentality, cosmopolitanization and conversation analysis; 8. Experimental social psychology: concealing and exaggerating; 9. Conclusion and recommendations.

Michael Billig has been Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University for more than 25 years. In 2011 he received the Distinguished Contribution to Social Psychology Award from the Social Section of the British Psychological Society. He is the author of Freudian Repression (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Arguing and Thinking (Cambridge University Press, 1987, 1996).