Science, Social Work, and Bureaucracy

Science, Social Work, and Bureaucracy

Research Synthesis • Reference Writing • Explanatory Writing • Information Organization

Greenwood Press | 2006

I was commissioned to write a chapter on American adoption and foster care from 1930 through 1969 for an interdisciplinary historical reference volume. The subject and chronological boundaries were established by the book's editors; my job was to determine what readers most needed to understand about four decades of institutional, professional, legal, and cultural change.

The challenge was to synthesize a large body of scholarship without turning the chapter into either a chronology of events or a literature review. I organized the material thematically, connecting changes in child-welfare policy, the professionalization of social work, adoption practices, race, family formation, secrecy and disclosure, and the beginnings of adoptee-rights activism.

Reference writing requires a different approach from writing primarily for other specialists. Readers may have little prior knowledge of the subject, but they still need enough context to understand competing ideas, unintended consequences, and the relationships among developments taking place at the same time. My goal was to make a complex body of research accessible without sacrificing its complexity.

The resulting chapter demonstrates a kind of research-based writing that transfers well beyond historical scholarship: entering a complicated subject, identifying what matters most, imposing a useful structure, and translating specialized knowledge into clear prose for readers who need an authoritative overview.

Selected work: Research synthesis • reference writing • explanatory writing • information architecture • secondary-source research • writing for non-specialist audiences