Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed Social Sciences. Michael Billig. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 240 pp. $22.99 pbk.To paraphrase a line from 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, this book had me at its title. Then again, it also a problem of professorial prose: how to not write badly a book review about writing badly social sciences-think Kramer's coffee table book about coffee tables on Seinfeld-especially when review is published a journal replete with writing by social scientists. But because book never criticizes gratuitous and self-conscious use of alliteration, at least I need not worry about turning tortured phrase posed a problem of professorial prose. More importantly, I will leave it up to you to decide if scholarly articles published these pages fall prey to pitfalls of bad academic writing that Michael Billig astutely identifies Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed Social Sciences.A social scientist and professor for more than twenty-five years at England's Loughborough University, Billig describes not only what he considers to be negative characteristics of social science writing today, but also sources that produce it and perpetuate it. Importantly, he undertakes this serious task with a sense of humor, acknowledging that the vast majority of social scientists . . . will not read this work, or even know of its existence, and will carry on as are. That somewhat fatalistic reality is unfortunate because many social scientists would do well, not only for themselves but for sake of their academic niches, to heed book's closing bit of advice: Don't fall love with your technical terms, because, as we know, love can make you blind.When it comes to technical jargon, Billig is especially troubled by social scientists' proclivity for creating new nouns to make their thoughts sound original and, turn, gain professional prominence for themselves among peers. The big concepts which many social scientists are using-the ifications and izations-are poorly equipped for describing what people do. By rolling out big nouns, social scientists can avoid describing people and their actions, Billig writes. As he laments Chapter Five about fondness of many social scientists for turning people into things, in race for status, using smaller words to describe what people do comes a long way down field. Social scientists love to turn verbs into nouns, Billig explains, noting they prefer abstract noun 'reification' to verb 'to reify.'In many ways, this book is a wake-up call for academic social scientists who, like fish in water, do not notice what are doing. They just keep swimming through density of their own prose. This is sadly ironic. As Billig points out Chapter Three, where he dissects and eviscerates use of academic phrase the ideational metafunction, no one is born with ability to produce convoluted sentences that academic social scientists regularly write. …