Steve Kroll-Smith was plucky to devote this number of Sociological Inquiry to the knotty subject of writing sociology and to invite several of us with differing orientations to comment. Kai Erikson's keynote article opened it up and four sociologists added their, often dissenting, reflections. Resilient and wise, Kai then added a thoughtful rejoinder disavowing much of his initial paper and recasting and refining his views. I wrote a first draft of “A Coda” after reading all the original contributions. Then, after studying Kai's rejoinder, I substantially revised my thoughts into their current form. Kai's later views and my own have much in common. I will address my orientation to sociology, ideas about how to write clearly, traditional humanist criticisms, conceptual clarity, the “sociologies” or languages of sociology, thinking sociologically, and sustaining reader interest. I will also note some difficulties in writing sociology and the convergences and divergences among the authors. Writing has always riveted me, and most of my teaching has stressed writing. My commitment is to symbolic interaction and interpretive sociology, with an emphasis on social identity and social context. Although I am an experienced survey analyst, I resonate to what Dorothy Smith aptly calls “institutional ethnography,” an orientation that the contributors here may find congenial. My own mantra for writing sociology became simplicity, order, and clarity, or SOC, a useful mnemonic for sociologists, perhaps all didactic writers. It took years for me to fight my bêtes noires: being fanciful, discursive, wordy, flowery, and vague. The war cry at Cornell, where I did my graduate work, was “Get the little book!”—The Elements of Style in which Will Strunk (2000) commands, “Omit needless words!” I took his decree to heart. The Elements of Style, however, concerns how to think as much as how to write felicitously. I have advocated it ever since. Later, I also recommended Howard Becker's (1986) Writing for Social Scientists. Lively and humorous, it is perceptive and useful. Howie proclaimed that the passive voice, which Professor Strunk commands us to avoid, is simply bad sociology because it masks the agent of an action. Regardless of discipline, writing and developing as a writer are hard work; both take plenty of time and patience. Sociological writing may pose yet additional obstacles. Here's a warning: if you begin writing with simplicity, order, and clarity foremost in mind, you are, however, inviting writer's block and blunted creativity. First, you must know what you are trying to write about and then get it down. As E. B. White most famously said, “It is better to get a blunder behind you than to sit staring at a blank page!” When you think you’re finished, then it is time to “Strunk it” for SOC. Even though you will eventually internalize the principles, apply them lightly at first and, stringently, only later. To turn explicitly to the contributions here, Kai Erikson's lead article baffled me. With relief, I read Kai's admission in his rejoinder that one critic had called it “schizophrenic.” In his reply, Kai admits to his initial ambivalence of prideful and defensive attitudes toward sociological writing. Kai relates many of the humanists’ diatribes about sociological writing with gusto, and he pleas for more felicity of expression in our profession. I suggest the put-downs have been counters in a competitive game of dominance from a position of ignorance. Sociologists were the parvenus after political scientists and economists, themselves earlier upstarts. Does the prose of sociology still deserve its poor old reputation? I consulted a philosopher and an English professor. When asked, both of them laughed and volunteered that many sociologists wrote well and that humanistic writing today was often turgid and unintelligible. Today we might well ask deconstructionist English professors, “What do you mean?” Those bywords for clarity are Robert Merton's scientific institution of “organized skepticism” at the interpersonal level. They were maddeningly ubiquitous in my first year in graduate school. Ever since, they have guided me along with Strunk and White's rules as bullshit detectors and guides to clear thinking. Sociologists should quit our nostra culpas, self-flagellation and abject submission to humanists. We should be humble about our imperfections and limitations yet take reasonable pride in our craft. When I read Howard Becker's piece, I was dismayed. Howie argues that elegance is not at all what we’re about and that clarity is. I was partly at odds with Kai and sympathetic to Howie's argument for clarity. Kai's rejoinder helped me resolve my conflict. He casts off his “schizophrenia” and essentially comes to accept the argument for clarity. Dorothy Smith, too, contends that Kai's initial discussion is about style. That is partly so, but in his rejoinder Kai observes that The Elements of Style really deals with the conceptual. Dorothy Smith and Howard Becker compel Kai to abandon his earlier use of the term, “style,” and to maintain that Strunk and White are “addressing constructs [Kai's emphasis] in The Elements of Style.” In his lead piece, Kai assumes implicitly that sociologists share a consensus about what sociology is. Kai twice invokes the phrase, “the logic of their perspective” as though we all agreed. In this view some immanent geist of the discipline compels the sociologist in a certain direction. Note how often Kai uses the definite article and by using the singular reveals his supposition that the field is unified, “the”, for example, “the way they look that gives the field its special distinction.” Dorothy Smith points to “a fundamental divergence between the sociology he [Kai] represents and the sociology I practice.” Her emphasis is on lexical possibilities for representation in sociology, not stylistic elegance as she declares: “Sociology does something distinctive; has its own landscape, its own form of reality.” I would enter the qualification that she should press on with the issue of divergent types of sociology and that her use of the singular, “sociology” and “its,” is misleading. Sociology is not one. Dorothy Smith's contention that her sociology differed from Kai's is provocative. It provoked Kai and Stanton Wheeler to decide there are languages of sociology and me to conclude independently that there are sociologies. Sociology is not, then, unitary. There are sociologies, as the mere presence of the Dorothy Smith and Ben Agger contributions further attests as do other varieties of sociology not included in this collection, for example, structuralist, neo-positivist, quantitative, world-system. The diversity of problems and approaches in sociology has always been exciting to me. There are many supplementary and sometimes clashing ways of looking at phenomena in our discipline. For what looks like a cacophony of voices, look at any of the programs for our national meetings. Kroll-Smith and I agreed on the title, “Writing Sociologies: A Coda” for this contribution. In his rejoinder, Kai observes how “very different” are the “voices”[emphasis mine] of six noted sociologists of different generations, all of which had rung true to him. Kai and I have, thus, converged. There are yet other issues when we think about constructs or “the conceptual.” Writing is not really separable from thinking and is, indeed, thought that has been frozen and crystallized, only to be thawed out and reworked and refrozen. Therefore, as Dorothy Smith notes, the kind of sociology we do is inseparable from how we write. The forms of expression should follow the problem and the way we attack it. Dorothy Smith observes that sociologists do have specialized vocabularies. The metaphor or imagery we use and the problem we examine determine how we shall think and therefore write. What is our kind of sociology? What sets limits to the attainability of elegance and clarity? What of the contexts in which we practice sociology and what is our readership? It is crucial to ascertain what is the metaphor, image, or model that is intertwined with the voice, language, and vocabulary of sociological discourse. With ethnographic types of research, this may be emergent in the field and cannot be decided upon a priori. This issue may be more complicated than, or at least different from, floors in a building or focal length. Do we have in mind a web, a system of institutions, a community, a network, organizing links between organizations, processes in change, factions warring and contesting for advantage? What are we trying to describe or explain? We enter the field with an image, not with a tabula rasa and almost certainly emerge with our imagery altered and sharpened. Dorothy Smith and Ben Agger both take stance against the received way of looking at the world. They represent two among several voices of critical sociology. Each deals respectively with issues of power. Dorothy Smith speaks to power and its voices in its often taken-for-granted universe of discourse from a countervailing feminist perspective. Similarly, Ben Agger attacks the problem of writing sociology from the dialectical perspective of the critical sociology of the Frankfurt School. His discussion is far from clear to me, but his approach to thinking about change is intriguing. Both Kai and Ben Agger note the fluidity of the phenomenon and the suppleness of language essential to capture it for the moment. How we can conceive of and capture the fluid and changing social world has been a perennial problem and won't go away. It is vexing that the capture of what is momentary itself turns out to be transitory. Perhaps whatever our vision of the world, it is perishable and inadequate to yield a valid enduring precipitate. At first, when I read Ben Agger's contribution, I was troubled by the dialectical transformations of the very language and the concepts. For Agger, analyses are bound to a sociocultural, historical context that is going to change as the conceptual language itself becomes transformed in wave after wave of change. This may be an existential plight for all of us, especially to the extent that we no longer quest after timeless laws. The reputation for poor writing, then, pales in significance in contrast to the uncertainty of the foundations of validity. Kai asserts that our discipline is a generalizing one and I concur. We pursue “regularities” using “the language of concomitance” as Kai notes. The goal is useful generalizations that give us a clear understanding of how people interact. In addition, we must, however, account for change in the patterns of interaction. At one level, the street scene in Kai's metaphor, we are close to dealing with what is subjective and ethnographic. To invoke Alfred Schutz's seminal thought: we are trying at this level to typify how people make their typifications of how reality appears to them. Thus, we have to get close to the immediate world as perceived by the person as our point of departure. But notice that, first, we are entering into the subjective point of view of the actor, most likely through the actor's own interpretive account. And then, second, we look at intersubjective understandings, the agreements between people, and how these affect their actions. We range from person to dyad to groups to more complex collectivities and commonly shared understandings that are frequently unwitting to the actors themselves—masked or covert, even invisible. At all levels we are aiming to construct a sociological account of interconnectedness. How are the actions of people and organizations interlinked? How do these linkages change? We do need, however, a scheme of organization and should try to tell a story as best we can. Many of the students of The Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research wrote about survey findings as though they were telling a story about the relationships in the data themselves. When you live with quantitative data, you can find awe and excitement and humor and disappointment even in social survey data as did Samuel Stouffer, who evidently used to jump with excitement as the IBM card sorter sifted Hollerith cards into bins confirming or disconfirming his hypotheses. The alternative today is to marvel at relationships in the statistical tables almost magically and too easily belched out by high-speed computers. Somehow, even with our perspectives at some remote level like Kai's 14th-floor story, perhaps we can work in that spirit, the spirit of discovering a tale in the data. It is often hard to make our analyses vivid and elegant. The “dull, important” is hard to dress up and bring to life, but we ought to try. Social demographers and economists, frequently more removed from the immediacy of the subjective account of the actor than the ethnographer or even the survey analyst, often use narrative devices to enliven their analyses, at least to lay audiences. As I read Hana's cogent and plaintive piece, I kept thinking of Tom Hanks's importuning the women's baseball team he was coaching, “There's no crying in baseball.” That's because Hana kept on the theme of emotion and lyricism in writing. Hana is correct in telling us to use strong verbs, but what if the precise verb is not especially strong in everyday understanding? For us, there must be beauty in precision itself. A concern that Kai lays to rest as he discusses Mark Twain is the disenchantment of the phenomenon. One's sense of awe at society and human interaction is inextinguishable. For Hana's colleagues and Hana herself, I suggest that just as there are multiple intelligences, there are multiple forms of creativity. There are multiple ways of seeing, perhaps especially in sociology because the subject is conscious. A lyrical way of seeing becomes another dimension of responding to the phenomenon. Perhaps our writing can be elegant or lyrical as additional layers of meaning in a general analysis which is the central task. I echo Howie's praise for the clarity of Edwin Sutherland's conception of white-collar crime and Erving's (1990) total institutions in Asylums. That these are not at a high level of abstraction and are close to the first floor may facilitate attaining clarity. Howard Becker's contribution is vintage Becker. My own favorite for exactness is George Homans's The Human Group (1950) and Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1974). Homans's dryly belaboring points may drive you to distraction, but he is always doing his ruthless best to be absolutely clear. He is sometimes wrong or questionable, but you always know how he is right or wrong. Sometimes he achieves a spare elegance, and at the same time he is close to a narrative of interaction. Our problem, our preconceptions, our methods and findings, then, often limit the language in which we think. One of the best and most accessible guides to how to enter into and construct the viewpoint of the actor is Norman Denzin's (1989) Interpretive Interactionism. Sometimes with such points of departure we can often make our writing emotionally compelling—vivid, poignant, lyrical, tragic. That is not, however, our primary objective. Howard Becker's (1963) “Becoming a Marijuana User” is a classic not for affectively appealing language but for the dry distancing of the observer in its account of the social process through which identity becomes transformed. It is purely cognitive. It is also exciting in its intellectual impact. It is clear. It comes from trying to know how people in real life know. We are close to the first floor in Kai's imagery, but we have distanced ourselves as we use what Kai calls “the language of concomitance.” Howard Becker is faithful to E. C. Hughes and the career as a metaphor of change in identities as he captures and narrates a dynamic of change. As Kai maintains, we must depart from the personal and the narrative and the ethnographic approaches to attain a level of generality. At the most immediate level, we have the raw material for an ethnographic understanding. It is here that our language can be most alive, as Hana Brown points out. We are dealing with stories and real lives of real people. At some point, however, to generalize we must distance ourselves from such raw material. Though we can ask for simplicity, order, and clarity in our writing and thinking at all levels, we inevitably give up some of the richness and immediacy of our own narrative line or that of our key informants or respondents. But we don't have to give up the excitement of working in our enterprise. Perhaps, like Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, we can artfully use devices of plot and narrative, for, as Adam Gopnick points out, Darwin wrote like a Victorian novelist and incrementally introduced small surprises to arrive at the stunning conclusion (The New Yorker October 23, 2006). Lynd and Lynd employ masses of intrinsically fascinating ethnographic detail in their devastating, penetrating Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), though perhaps not with the theoretical impact of Darwin. Our material or the kind of publishing world we are in today may impose barriers to this kind of development or Kai's (1976) in Everything in Its Path ranging from events, personal accounts, the destruction of social structure, and the cultural context. Let's leap to something like the 21st floor. Blau and Duncan's (1967) The American Occupational Structure is heavy going even for most sociologists. They are at the 21st floor or yet higher at a macrosociological level. Though dull and abstruse for most of us, their topic is important and their writing clear. Rarified statistical techniques and mathematical modeling in some quarters of our profession can also be daunting. Similarly, an empirical generalization can be dry and conceptual and dull and so also with a set of empirical generalizations until you harness them to a conceptual or theoretical framework or some program for policy and social action. Empirical generalizations can be lifeless, close to meaningless, unless a conceptual scheme or theoretical idea informs their interrelationships. Recall how Durkheim (1997) organizes a large array in Suicide and how intellectually exciting it is. Dorothy Smith argues that sociologists do need a specialized vocabulary. The sociologist, however, owes clarity to other sociologists. Given that sociology is not isolated in a vacuum, we also owe nonsociologists a serviceable translation of what may be intelligible only to other sociologists. Sometimes the translating is difficult. It is almost certain that the lay person's intuitive grasp will be aided by the immediacy of the account. Social psychology may be more accessible than an account of social structures and their patterning. To reiterate, translation of some of our necessary technical arcana (suitable for 14th floor, 21st floor, or whatever) into language an intelligent layman (or policy maker or administrator) can understand is possible. It is a daunting task, but needs doing. To do so, we may not always be able to achieve elegance or lyricism, but we can achieve simplicity, order, clarity. In this symposium, we seem to agree that our language should, above all else, be clear. That sentences, as opposed to mere words, may appear to reflect the fluid nature of reality by “moving like rolling film,” as Kai speculates, is largely an illusion. The reason I think it's illusory is because syntax is itself a social construction just as is vocabulary, the result of many arbitrary selections prefabricated by a cultural and linguistic history over which we have no control. We have to try anyway and perhaps help the syntax and meanings to evolve. Most of us do not wish, however, to embark on a metalanguage or to coin barbarous neologisms. I empathize with Kai's planning “. . . to slog on anyway as if language could be a saving grace rather than an obstacle to understanding.” We write with the language we have, not the language we wish for. From the outset, all our thought processes are always in some sense rooted in or point to observation—a point that occupies Kai and Dorothy Smith. We may have similar, yet different voices, as we achieve “conceptual distance” from the phenomenon we observe. To rephrase Hana Brown's discussion so as to make it refer to multiple perspectives, each sociologist's vision of the world becomes a view of the world but also a means of engaging with it. We attempt to discern the often taken-for-granted and unseen patterns coordinating the strands behind everyday life. Kai reflects the general view that a burden for sociologists is that we are not an “individualizing” discipline. Historians and biographers don't have the responsibility to typify. Narrative cannot stand on its own—it's up to us to make sociology out of it. Here is a final cautionary note. Sometimes, too zealous an insistence on clarity can put us in the bind of “premature closure.” Sometimes ambiguities are useful. For example, David Riesman often played the devil's disciple by being a “contextual contrarian” to force those engaged in discussion with him to examine their point of view. Sometimes an ambiguity may even be productive. For example, the French word, conscience means both consciousness and conscience. Thus, Durkheim's development of the concept of anomie shifts. First, there is the cognitive sense of pluralistic ignorance rooted in occupational specialization; then, there is the moral sense of normative variations. Clarity is, of course, still the ultimate aim. Simplicity, order, and clarity (SOC) are noble objectives but should not constrict. I have ranged fairly far in my coda. I have covered a number of issues in writing and thinking sociology. At some points, this piece looks like tips for sociology writers. I attempted also to instill pride in sociological writing and lay to rest the traditional critiques of humanists. The authors here agree that there are “sociologies” or languages of sociology. Thinking and writing sociologically and sustaining reader interest will not go away as problems, but it is cowardice not to proceed anyway. Springliness of mind should infuse our endeavors, but cannot be commanded—it has to develop. One element has entered implicitly into the discussions. To make this explicit, the enterprise must engage the sociologist. All the authors in this issue of Sociological Inquiry have shown some level of affective attachment to what they’re doing. Thinking and writing must have an underlying emotional commitment or else they will be stillborn twins. Passionate intellectual engagement on a sociological problem drives meaningful discussion.