David and his
colleague Paula Thompson recently published an article
Use of Anthropomorphic Brand Mascots for Student Motivation and Engagement: A Promotional Case Study with Pablo the Penguin at the University of Portsmouth Library in New Review Review of Academic Librarianship. Here he shares
his thoughts/advice on the writing process.
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| Paula, David and Pablo |
Writing my first peer-reviewed academic journal article was
a very good learning experience, taking me right back to academic writing
assignments and was a very useful exercise in developing a clear writing style
and saying exactly what I wanted in a very few words. What is my advice to anyone about to write an
academic journal article?
Read everything you can find – no, more than that. The best ideas often get drawn out from
taking a new look at something buried deep within the most disparate and
unlikely looking articles.
Write down your main arguments as soon as they come to you
and before you forget them.
Understand that writing is a creative act – your best
thoughts will be those that come from creating new knowledge arising from
relating different ideas from different sources.
Follow the narrative - this is not an annotated bibliography
but a story reinterpreting and finding new meaning in the existing research in
light of both your new look at what has gone before and your new evidence.
Structure everything.
Bring everything that is similar together and separate those things that
are different into different groups. If
you find literature being cited anywhere other than the literature review, go
back and restructure again. As you
structure things better, you will find you have repeated yourself. Check you have actually repeated yourself, move a few citations to the one version
you are keeping, then cut away the duplicates.
Return to the beginning - what was it you wanted this paper
to say? Have you said it or do you need
to restructure it so that the structure follows the story you just set out.
Use short, simple words in short, simple sentences. Simplicity needs the right structure. You will be amazed how short something is
when you finally write it well. This is
how get your paper under the unforgiving word limit without cutting content and
give your messages as much impact as possible.
Allow more time than you think reasonable. It will take longer than you imagine
possible.
Hide. Hide away from
distractions, people asking questions, people bringing you other work…
Enlist brilliantly critical proof readers; one is never
enough. Make sure they are looking for
every conceivable blunder: sentences that trail off midway, spelling errors, use
of the wrong words, grammar, syntax, morphology, style, overlong sentences and
paragraphs, and anything else they can find to criticise.
Finally, unless like me you were lucky enough to have your
abstract accepted before you started writing, my understanding of the academic
press is that publishing is a lot like dating.
There are plenty of good journals out there and just because one or more
rejects your advances does not mean that your article will never find reviewers
that love it.
This blog post is the author’s own work and opinion and may differ from
that of his employer.
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