Teaching Writing for Publication

Abstract

Most graduate students who seek academic careers know that their future success depends upon their ability to publish. Yet although all successful graduate students learn how to conduct a research study, far fewer leave graduate school with the practical skills needed to turn their research into publishable articles or books. This article describes a course I taught on writing for scholarly publication. The course had two focuses: teaching how to write clearly and teaching about the business of scholarly publication. The course was open to both graduate students and undergraduate honors students; the latter are required to write theses similar to master's theses, although generally shorter, so all of these students face similar writing tasks and problems. Most of the students, both graduate and undergraduate, desired academic careers. All four of the graduate students were sociology majors. Two of the three undergraduates were psychology majors and one was a history major. The course was given at Arizona State University, a large commuter school; approximately 30 honors students complete a thesis each semester and approximately 25 graduate students are active in sociology. I decided to teach this course after reading Howard Becker's Writing for Social Scientists (1986). This book describes in part a similar, although less structured, course that Becker taught at Northwestern University. (For a description of a less formal writing seminar, see Vaughan 1988. For a description of a lowerlevel writing course, see Anderson and Holt 1990). I used Becker's book in my class and found that it sparked excellent discussions of several critical issues, such as taking risks in writing, avoiding academic jargon, and recognizing the need for revision. Our other major text was Williams's Style (1989). This book contains exceptionally clear descriptions of how to write good prose-far clearer, I believe, than the more widely known Elements of Style (Strunk and White 1979). Each week, students were assigned to read one chapter from Style; almost every week, they were assigned to revise their own papers or to edit another student's paper, using the principles set forth in that chapter. To supplement these readings, I also assigned chapters from William Zinsser's On Writing Well (1988). Although this book is directed toward nonacademic writers, it reinforced in an engaging and nonthreatening style many of the same points raised by the other readings while reminding the students of the power of good writing. To expose the students to the business of scholarly publishing, I also required the students to read selections from Scholarly Writing and Publishing (Fox 1985) and from a booklet prepared by the American Psychological Association, titled Understanding the Manuscript Review Process (Committee on Women in Psychology 1988). These readings discussed such issues as how editors evaluate manuscripts, how to overcome writer's block, and how to choose where to submit manuscripts. For our first class, I gave the students copies of the first two pages of an anonymous manuscript I had received to review. The students found it relatively easy to identify many problems with the writing. With some prompting, they also were able to see how to improve it. After we had worked on the paper for about an hour, I stopped and pointed out the basic principles of editing that the students had used in this revision. They had deleted excess words and phrases, had changed passive voice to active, had made the actors the subjects of their sentences, had placed the concepts they wanted to emphasize at the end rather than at the beginning of sentences and paragraphs, and had made supposedly parallel clauses truly parallel. In preparation for the second class, the students read the first two pages of two scholarly articles-one chosen for its graceful style (Melbin 1978) and the other for its awkwardness. Then they were assigned to write me a letter describing what they liked and what they disliked about the style in each article; I described this and certain other assignments as letters rather than essays to encourage the students to express their feelings without worrying about producing the