2.9 don't let the title fool you: my fave book on academic writing
if there was a pantheon of academic how to books, this one would be at the top - but the reasons i love it so much might not be the ones you think! tune into this week's episode to hear which book basically acted as the seminar in academic writing i never got in graduate school!
resources:
the book i recommend (no spoilers!)
my colleague dr. lisa munro teaches a seminar based on the book that's enrolling for this summer!
downloadable guide to running your own writing group
join the community for just $5 a month!
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
I am so excited to be hosting Structure as a Path to Sustainability with Dr. Kate Henry on May 10 - a one stop shop for overcoming overwhelm and lighting the way towards completing your next self-directed writing project. Enrollment is open now! My newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about all the new stuff (and the sales) so hop on the list here!
-
Part workbook, part writing seminar, part demystifying the academic publishing process. Let's talk about the one book that I recommend to most scholars in this week's episode.
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
I imagine that if you are listening to this podcast, some part of you likes to read books. One of the genres of books that I can not get enough of are the kind of, how to manuals of whatever thing I'm into. So if I am into knitting, I want to read every book about how to do knitting. Gardening you name it. But this interest was really kicked up a notch when I was in grad school, partially because I was one of the first people in my family to go to graduate school. Therefore I didn't understand a lot about it.
And the book that more than anything gave me the foundation to better understand the academic writing and the academic publishing process. And that book..dun dun dun dun... Is: Writing your Journal Article in 12 weeks: a Guide to Academic Publishing Success by Dr. Wendy Laura Belcher.
If there's a Pantheon of academic, how to books, this one sits right at the top level. Most people have heard about it. And that's one of the reasons why I'm recommending it, because I try to mostly talk about things that are free or easy to get your hands on. And the writing your journal article book has been come out in a couple of different editions. It was revised recently. There are copies a plenty in libraries in your fellow graduate students, bookcases. So I'm very confident that you'll be able to get your hands on this, if not for free than for very close to it. So that's step one. This is a popular book.
I want to dispel a misconception, but at least I had, when I was going into this book,
I looked at the title and I thought, cool, this is a book that will let me write a journal article. From zero, no research done to published or sent off to a journal in 12 weeks.
Actually this book starts from the premise that you already have a draft of a journal article. So in case you were thinking that you would be able to research, outline, edit, revise, and then submit an article in 12 weeks, you might be able to, but this book walks you through it. At a slower pace.
And that's one of the biggest misconceptions about this book. It's not a start from zero to publishable article in 12 weeks. It start from draft, but that isn't to say that it's not really useful because it is. So if you're an early career graduate student, then this might be a book that you use to take a seminar paper into your first article draft or a conference paper, or maybe parts of your master's thesis or an undergraduate thesis. Any draft that you have laying around is going to be useful for this book, but make sure you have that draft before you start.
Other things to know about this book, you can do it by yourself. It's also written and gives you tips for doing this book with a group. I know lots of groups of graduate students that have met over the summer and worked through this book together. A group accountability, definitely aids in the process, but there's nothing that you can't do by yourself.
And it has different chapters. So it starts with things like setting up your writing schedule, figuring out the time maybe going through and selecting the presses that you want to submit to. It walks you through all of the steps that you would need to take that draft of rough writing and get it ready to submit to her journal.
Including the choosing of the journal, the submission process, writing a letter to the editor response letters. Et cetera.
So you will have to make some adjustments for various disciplines. The book is probably best geared toward people who are writing in the humanities or social science disciplines. And a lot of the examples draw from that. It's a little bit harder with some of the STEM disciplines.
That isn't to say that there aren't useful things in this book for scholars of any type, just that other disciplines that aren't fitting as neatly into the kind of example, pool might have to work a little bit harder to adapt it. Now.
I want to share with you. What I actually think is the real magic of this book, which is the fact that it is for my money. Some of the most concise. Actionable. Practical writing advice that you can get about academic argumentation anywhere.
And that is a hill that I'm more than happy to defend.
I never took a graduate seminar on academic writing. And it seemed like something that everyone just assumed that I had had before I arrived at my PhD program. And so when people were saying things like, oh, you know, this needs to be restructured, or I wish that the argument were a little bit clear, a baby PhD me had no idea what that meant. And this book was the first and most important step in me learning what people meant.
It has excellent chapters around revising, thinking through various structures. Editing on a sentence level, working with the literature, sharpening up your argument. All things that were talked about around me and I never fully understood until I read this book.
It's also a really useful starting point for understanding the academic writing process. If you come in with less background knowledge about how say a journal article is born, then this book has really useful practical strategies, exercises, and explanations of what it means to actually be peer reviewed or how you pick a journal or what things you need to prepare in order to submit to the journal or how you find out what their requirements for publishing are.
There are so many things that are hidden in the academic graduate school curriculum. We just assume that you know, what a peer reviewed article is, how to find a top journal and how to get published in it.
And this book has a lot of easy to read. Easier to understand, plain-spoken explanations about the academic writing process.
I think anyone who likes a little bit of structure to move projects forward would absolutely benefit from at least leafing through this book. Even if they don't necessarily follow the exact strict 12 week model. I know that one of the things that I miss the most when I started working on my dissertation was the fact that I didn't have like a syllabus like this week do this, this week, do this. And this book gave me a syllabus of sorts that I could follow. And I ended up adapting a lot of it as I worked on the longer pieces, like my dissertation.
So if you've been missing that kind of weekly assignment energy from your seminars, This book can be a good replacement for it.
So many of us actually need structure. And it's really hard. To know how to, for example, break things down into smaller steps if you've never done those steps before. And what I appreciate the most about a book, like writing your journal article in 12 weeks is that it gives you a template for figuring out what the various steps are in a project that can be as abstract and difficult and intimidating as writing an academic article.
And if the idea of making sustainable repeatable structures for long-term writing projects sounds like something that you could use some support in. Then please check out the workshop that I am running with dr. Kate Henry in early may. All of the details are in the show notes, and I would love to have you consider it.
But either way. I hope that you have a great week and thank you so much for listening.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!