Writing Tips: How to Organize a Sociology Paper
By: Jill Richardson
Tags: Writing Tips, Academic Writing, Writing, Harry Potter, Sociology

When I started as a sociology grad student, I was a seasoned writer but a novice at sociology and at academic writing. To be honest, I was pretty lousy at both. It’s taken me a while to get up to speed. Here are some tips I’ve picked up along the way, using an example of Harry Potter.

Let’s say my paper is about gender dynamics in the Harry Potter book series. I notice that femininity is often portrayed in a negative light, and the masculinity is portrayed as superior. This is a concept called androcentrism: “gender-based prejudice: the granting of higher status, respect, value, reward, and power to the masculine compared to the feminine” (Wade and Ferree p. 119). This is true in both male and female characters in the book, but I decide that there is so much to say just about women and girls that I’ll focus only on them.

Chronological Storytelling: An easier but usually less effective way to write your paper

One option for writing my paper is simply by telling the story of Harry Potter, in order, and making comments about the women along the way:

Harry Potter’s parents were killed by Voldemort but somehow he miraculously survived. He is taken in by his aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, who abuse him and lie to him about his parents and magic. At age 11, he finds out he is a wizard from Hagrid. He gets his supplies at Diagon Alley and goes to Hogwarts.

At this point, I’ve already recapped quite a bit of plot without having anything much to say about androcentrism or a negative portrayal of femininity. I might comment on the introduction of Mrs. Weasley and Ginny on the train platform, but at that point the reader doesn’t know yet that Mrs. Weasley will become like an adopted mother to Harry, or that he will one day marry Ginny. We have no idea that Mrs. Weasley will be portrayed as a nagging shrew with poor boundaries, or that Ginny will be so strong or so sporty as she grows up.

It’s not really until the reader meets Hermione that there is something to comment on. Hermione likes to follow rules and push others to do so as well. She’s a bit bossy and often called “shrill.” She’s a know-it-all, and she’s pretty annoying until after the troll incident at Halloween (and sometimes after that too). She’s not much of a girly-girl, although she’s almost entirely ignorant about Quidditch, and she does dress up nicely for the Yule Ball in book 4. In book 5, she acts almost as an emotional translator for the boys, using her feminine powers of empathy to understand how Cho feels and explain it to Harry and Ron, who can’t believe that one person could feel so much at once or that another person could understand it. But Hermione doesn’t do all of that immediately in book one, so if we’re going chronologically, we’ll just have a few comments here and there about each female character we meet in the order that we meet them, and the ideas in the paper will be disorganized.

It’s easier to write your paper this way because you can simply go in order of the story you know and then comment on what you observe as you go. However, you generally end up with poorer organization than a differently structured paper, and you take up a lot of space simply telling a story that has little to do with sociology.

Sometimes I find it helpful to start writing my paper this way just to get started. Then I can edit or re-write it from there to put it into a format that is more difficult to write but better organized and more analytical. Writing chronologically is not a bad way to start, but be prepared to edit heavily or to even toss out your initial draft and rewrite it if you start out this way.

Another Way: Organize Your Paper by Characters

Another option could be to organize the paper by writing about a few different characters. If I was going for an essay with three body paragraphs, I might choose to have a paragraph on Hermione, one on Mrs. Weasley, and one on Umbridge. But what about Ginny?

Maybe I could do groups of characters: Evil Women (Mrs. Dursley, Bellatrix Lestrange, & Dolores Umbridge), Hogwarts Students (Hermione, Ginny, Cho, Luna, Lavender), and Good Adults (Mrs. Weasley, Tonks, Lily Potter, Prof. MacGonagall).

Again, my paper is supposed to be about ideas — about the idea that this series shows androcentrism in women and girls — and not about the characters themselves. Organizing it around characters makes it hard to focus on the ideas. It will be tempting to describe who the characters are and what they do instead of the concepts they illustrate. I might end up repeating the same point several times over — like if I point out that Umbridge is highly feminine and bad and then later also point out that Lavender’s femininity is portrayed badly too, or if I point out that Hermione is a nag and later say the same thing about Mrs Weasley. It would be better to make the point that sometimes women are shown as nags, giving Hermione and Mrs. Weasley as examples, and that the most feminine characters are shown negatively, giving Umbrige and Lavender as examples, and have those be the ideas to organize the paper around.

A Better Way: Organize Your Paper By Ideas

I sat down and brainstormed themes I noticed on how women and femininity are portrayed in Harry Potter:

Rowling portrays femininity as a negative trait in her most feminine characters, Umbridge and Lavender. This is also perhaps the case for Parvati and Trelawney. Rowling’s stronger female characters tend to be less feminine and no-nonsense like MacGonagall or Sprout. Sometimes women are portrayed as shrewish and with bad boundaries, especially in the case of Hermione and Mrs Weasley but also in the case of the librarian and perhaps even Madam Pomfrey. Fleur Delacour, the very feminine and only female Tri-Wizard Champion is portrayed as much less fierce than the men she competes against and later takes on what appears to be a housewife role once married to Bill. Harry falls for two female Quiddich players and he attributes Ginny’s lack of tearfulness to her growing up with five brothers. Often female characters cry while men hold back tears, comfort the women, or look away from one another to hide their emotions. The one way in which femininity is portrayed in a positive light is when mothers are nurturing, like Lily Potter or Mrs. Weasley (sometimes).

In this case, you can see that I am not going in chronological order, nor am I telling the story at all. I’m hardly even providing examples. Right now, these are just notes for myself.

I decide to pick out some ideas and organize them:

Feminine traits often are viewed as negative, particularly when Umbridge practically weaponizes them or when Lavender is a one-dimensional character who can’t relate to her boyfriend enough to form a real relationship with him. Fleur is even shown negatively to some extent.

Femininity is portrayed most positively when women are shown as loving mother figures (Lily Potter, Mrs. Weasley) or objects of male lust or love (Madam Rosmerta, Cho, Ginny, Fleur).

Lack of femininity is often portrayed positively (Ginny’s lack of tearfulness in book 7, for example, or Hermione not being a girly-girl, or MacGonagall being a strong leader but not too feminine).

Sometimes women who are more outspoken are imbued with negative traits (shrewishness, nagging, bad boundaries, bossiness, shrillness) instead of being portrayed more positively as leaders. However, sometimes women are shown as effective leaders in a more positive, no-nonsense, not overly feminine way (MacGonagall).

Masculine traits in women are often viewed as superior (being tough, brave, sporty, willing to break rules, Hermione socking Draco Malfoy in the face or responding to his taunting with a snappy comeback like in Book 4 when she makes a comment about Mad-Eye turning him into a ferret, Ginny being ballsy like Fred and George in book 5)

This can help me come up with a thesis statement and organize the paper. The overall trend is one of androcentrism in women, in which masculine traits are shown as more valuable than feminine traits. Then the paragraphs in the paper can emphasize the points above, one at a time, illustrating each with examples.

Notice that the point is that I am focusing on social theory more than story and plot. The story and the plot aren’t totally irrelevant, but I am going to write about them in order to support an idea about how society in the Wizarding World is structured.

Let’s say I kick off the paper with an introduction that defines androcentrism and makes it clear that this paper is going to show that JK Rowling portrays androcentrism in her women characters, both by devaluing femininity and valuing masculinity. I might wish to make it clear that androcentrism runs throughout characters of all genders, but this particular paper will focus solely on the women. Or I could just not mention men and write only about women.

Then I get to my first point. Remember the focus is not on the story of Harry Potter, or even on describing a specific character, but an idea: Femininity is often portrayed negatively in Harry Potter. If I have any good sociological literature to cite to explain this concept further or to provide context or evidence that this devaluing femininity is not limited to JK Rowling and Harry Potter alone, and tells how it fits into our society as a a whole, I should include that too. Then I must illustrate this with examples from the book.

Here’s one way to write out the first point from the list above:

The most decidedly feminine characters in Harry Potter are without a doubt Dolores Umbridge and Lavender Brown, and, to a lesser extent, Parvati Patil and Sybil Trelawney. Each of these women is portrayed negatively, and sometimes their femininity is clearly a cause of their undesirability. Umbridge, a Ministry of Magic official who temporarily takes a job at Hogwarts in Book 5, practically weaponizes femininity as a tool of evil. Although she is not a Death Eater, she is cruel, calculating, power-hungry, and unfair. She wears bows on her head, decorates her office with lace, doilies, and pictures of kittens, and often gives a “girlish” laugh, particularly when she is doing something cruel. Although she is evil, she is also extraordinarily ineffective at magic. Lavender Brown, a classmate of Harry Potter, shows a more benign but immature and out-of-touch femininity when she dates Ron Weasley in book 6. Their relationship is based solely on “snogging” and not of true emotional closeness, and she is unable to understand Ron at all — so much that she gives him the embarrassing nickname “Won-Won” and a ridiculous girly necklace he will never wear for Christmas. She and her best friend Parvati are duped into believing that Sybil Trelawney, the fraudulent professor of Divination, is truly able to see the future. While Trelawney is not the most feminine character in the book, her classroom is described as extremely feminine, smelling of perfume and containing poufs and teacups. She is shown as foolish and incompetent, yet unaware of her own failures. In each of these cases, the characters’ femininity is portrayed in a negative light. In the fight against Voldemort that plays out over all seven books, none of these figures ever play a significant role, with the exception of the participation of Lavender and Trelawney in the final battle at the end of the series.

This version explains clearly that one way in which the books show androcentrism in women is by devaluing femininity. It provides specific examples, and it explains who each character it names is and enough of the plot for the reader to understand the point being made. It begins and ends by emphasizing the main point, that these femininity is shown as a bad thing, and that the most feminine female characters are portrayed negatively.

For the most part, even someone not very familiar with Harry Potter would be able to read and understand this. However, it doesn’t provide extra plot details or information about characters beyond what is necessary. It assumes the reader understands who Harry Potter and Voldemort are, what a Death Eater is, and that it’s a seven book series about Harry Potter’s fight against Voldemort.

The point of this essay is not who Harry Potter is, or what happened in the books, and it doesn’t solely focus on a single female character like Hermione. It’s very clearly on illustrating a social phenomenon (androcentrism) and on making the case that androcentrism appears in the Harry Potter books. It shows this by examining many of the major female characters and comparing and contrasting them to one another.

It still leaves out some characters. A minor character that could go into the example of “femininity as bad” is Hepzibah Smith in Book 6. She’s an extremely minor character who appears briefly before Voldemort kills her, and she’s both very feminine and very foolish. In this case, I feel like what I wrote makes its point well enough without bringing her up, and adding a sentence or two on Hepzibah Smith would add to the length of my essay without contributing new ideas.

Notice how much I wrote before I actually wrote the draft above. I was unable to come up with that draft off the top of my head. First, I had to brainstorm some ideas, organize them, and come up with a thesis statement and major points to support my thesis statement. Then once I did that, I could write out the first of my supporting points and select examples to illustrate it with.

It’s more work up front to structure your paper based around ideas like this, but there’s a pay-off when you are able to do it. Although it requires extra planning and brainstorming up front, once you begin writing, your paper will be much easier to write. When I knew I was writing a few paragraphs on how JK Rowling portrays femininity as bad in Harry Potter, and I knew which characters best demonstrated that, it was very easy to write it up. Hopefully the extra work up front gave me a big enough pay off that I did less work later and I wrote a better paper overall.

Sources:

Wade, Lisa and Myra Marx Ferree. Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions.

Rowling, JK. Harry Potter Books 1–7.