Book excerpt: An accessible guide for writers in the social sciences. With friendly irreverence, Douglas Flemons demystifies the creative and scholarly demands of social-scientific writing. He walks readers through the process of researching, organizing, creating, and editing papers, theses, and dissertations. Avoiding grammarianese, he shows how sentences tell stories and how punctuation marks and certain words give readers necessary directional cues. The guiding premise here is that keeping track of relationships between words, sentences, and paragraphs will enable writers to compose clear, thoughtful, aesthetic prose.