Writing Qualitative Inquiry: Self, Stories, and Academic Life

Responding to the rapid growth of personal narrative as a method of inquiry among qualitative scholars, Bud Goodall offers a concise volume of practical advice for scholars and students seeking to work in this tradition. He provides writing tips and strategies from a well-published, successful author of creative nonfiction and concrete guidance on finding appropriate outlets for your work. For readers, he offers a set of criteria to assess the quality of creative nonfiction writing. Goodall suggests paths to success within the academy-- still rife with political sinkholes for the narrative ethnographer-- and ways of building a career as a public scholar. Goodall's work serves as both a writing manual and career guide for those in qualitative inquiry.

H. L. (Bud) Goodall, Jr. is Professor of Communication and Director of the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.  He is the author or co-author of 20 books, including A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family (Left Coast Press, 2006), and over 100 articles, chapters, and papers.  A Need to Know received the 2006 Best Book Award by the National Communication Association Ethnography Division. A pioneer in the field of creative nonfiction, he has authored works on high technology organizations and cultures, rock n roll bands, and alternative religions.  With Eric Eisenberg and Angela Trethewey, he is the co-author of the award-winning textbook, Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint, now in its fifth edition, and he authored the highly acclaimed Writing the New Ethnography in 2000. His forthcoming edited volume, with Steve Corman and Angela Trethewey, is Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Strategic Communication and the Struggle Against Violent Extremists.