Excerpts from the Three Scholarly Genres
There is not always an absolute line dividing the three genres of scholarly books and it's not always easy to differentiate one from the other. The most reliable way to determine in which of the three categories a book fits is the manner of writing concerning language, tone, and technique, and it's this you should keep in mind when you set out to write a scholarly nonfiction book.
To give you an idea how different modes of writing are employed in the scholarly nonfiction genres, consider the following three excerpts. Each excerpt represents one of the three scholarly genres and it should not be difficult to discern the differences.
“In contrast to Freud's psychology, with its biological individualism and its innate competitiveness and aggression, Erich Fromm sees the key problem of psychology as ‘that of the specific kind of relatedness of the individual towards the world and not that of the satisfaction or frustration of this or that instinctual need per se.’ Following Karl Marx and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm sees people as primarily social beings, i.e. social in their very selves and not just in their needs.” (The Healing Dialogue in Psychotherapy by Maurice S. Friedman)
“The main function of the dream is to preserve sleep. The experience one is aware of during sleep, which upon waking is referred to by the sleeper as a dream, is the end result of unconscious mental activity that, by its nature or intensity, threatens to interrupt sleep. Instead of waking up, the sleeper dreams, and sleep is protected. The conscious experience during sleep, which the sleeper may or may not recall after waking, is referred to as the manifest dream. The unconscious ideas, wishes, and feelings that threaten to wake the sleeper make up the latent dream.” (“The Theory of the Unconscious” by Jack L. Solomon, MD, in Psychoanalytic Psychiatry for Lawyers, edited by Daniel B. Gesensway)
“The conclusion of this book is that anti-Semitism moved many thousands of ‘ordinary’ Germans — and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned — to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.” (Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen)
Think about the differences not only in word choice but tone and style in the three excerpts. What about the clarity and simplicity or complexity in which the information is delivered? Does one excerpt presume a certain level of sophistication and knowledge in the subject? Is there an idea or argument put forth that might arouse public interest and debate?
It should be fairly easy to determine that the excerpt from Maurice Friedman's book is purely scholarly. The second “hybrid” excerpt is from a book directed to attorneys and those in the mental health field with the goal of explaining psychoanalysis and its practical applications. Note that the tone is instructional but not obscure and the language is comprehensible. As previously mentioned, the excerpt from Goldhagen's book grew out of his dissertation and is clearly scholarly but the boldness and uniqueness of his thesis (concisely stated in the excerpt), aroused so much debate that the book became a bestseller. You should be able to see how his style was directed to a general audience whose thinking he wanted to influence.
