Intellectual Craftsmanship Reading Response: Mill\'s

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Reading response: Mill's "On Intellectual Craftsmanship"

Wright Mills directs his essay "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" to budding graduate students in the social sciences, specifically sociologists. Much of his advice is practical. For example, he advises his readers that, when doing research in the library, they should take notes on both the author's own ideas and also how the book can be used in their own work. He tells students to keep accurate bibliographic records and to constantly plan ahead. In other words, don't simply plan a project when asking for a grant -- create new plans at every juncture of a project, to ensure the sustained quality of the work.

Rearranging a file system for Mill is not dull and tedious, it is like rearranging a memory file or storage cabinet of concepts. Using a sociological imagination to design prospective studies of human behavior is another useful exercise: "Although you will never be able to get the money with which to do many of the empirical studies you design, it is necessary that you continue designing them. For once you lay out an empirical study, even if you do not follow it through, it leads you to a new search for data, which often turns out to have unsuspected relevance to your problems" (Mills 6). In short, not all research and creative ideas need to be brought to fruition to be useful, so long as they spur on what Mills calls the sociological imagination: "The sociological imagination, I remind you, in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and of its components" (Mills 9). Takings a playful attitude towards words used to define groups in the profession, creating new classification systems -- all of these can help one's research imagination (Mills10). Consider extremes of human behavior -- think outside the box of existing studies.