How to write journal article in 7 days

Alan Wong K.F.

(a.k.a @alanwong)

A caveat

You can turn a messy bunch of academic stuff into an article
quickly but you must have:

Data, ideas or artifacts,
Preliminary analysis or thoughts

Day: One

What sort of paper will you write?
Rugg and Petre (2003) claim journal articles can be understood as
falling into genres:

Data Driven
Methods Papers
Agenda Setting / Consciousness raising papers
Review papers
Theory papers

Writing in a range of genres shows your versatility as a scholar.

Where will I publish?
Where do people I like to read seem to get
published?
Which of these journals seem to get more citations?
(impact factors)
Do the editorial guidelines seem sympathetic to the
work I do?
What are the open access policies of this journal?

Data Driven papers should contain :-
What question is being addressed and why?
A description of the study and how it was
conducted
The results (data collected, analysis, findings)
Discussion (significance, limitations, claims to
generalisation)
Conclusion (implications, further work)

Data driven paper variations :




Work-in-progress paper
Meta studies paper
Artifact paper And



dont forget the pictures!





Method papers should contain:

What it is
How it works
What its good for (both utility and how its different)
Any constraints
Agenda setting paper
Consciousness raising papersLook at me papers


Review papers

Are usually written every ten years or so -
when someone (like a thesis writer!)
"bothers to read everything in a field" again
summarises it and provides evaluative
judgment.

Theory papers should:


Refine or extend existing theory and / or
critique and debunk it and / or
Set an agenda for new theory
Audience First?
They WONT want:
Lots of information they already know
a long winded literature review
lots of process-focused information.

They WILL want:
A tight, useful review of the literature
Well supported conclusions
A clear and well stated contribution to the field

Day 2:
An abstract for this workshop
Many Doctoral students have to write journal articles for
their PhD. While there is a lot of written advice on this
topic, it is often hard to follow because it is not put in
context with the daily activities of a professional writer
( Kamler and Thomson, 2006). This presentation collects
the best parts of this advice and puts them in a temporal
frame work, based on days of the week. This framework
helps PhD students see writing a paper as a purposeful,
step wise process, rather than a list of "dos and donts
which are hard to operationalise.

Write an abstract
Start with a couple of sentences:
Aim (This paper explores.)
Main argument (In this paper we argue that.)
Method (The study was conducted.)
Whats new? (this paper contributes to the debates on.)

Share your 4 sentences with the rest of your
group
Pay attention to the verbs!
Examines / Analyses
Reports on / Outlines
Argues / justifies / recommends
Compares / Contrasts
Discusses / Demonstrates
Shows / Refutes
highlights / Illustrates

Add a title for now
Thesis Whisperer Jnr (aged 10 and 1/4) wants to do his PhD about rocks (with a
side interest in gold). Dr Barry White advises there area range of theses Thesis
Whisperer Jnr would write on this topic depending on how he phrased the title:

As a question: What do school children know about rocks with gold in them?
As an exploration: Rocks in scrap heaps found in the Victorian gold
districts
As a statement: Why most school kids are not interested in rocks (even if
theres gold in them
As an investigation: Rocks with gold in them: places they are most likely to be
found
As a hypothesis: If rocks have gold in them, they are more likely to be dug up
As a thesis: rocks are cool, especially if there is gold in them

Day: Three


The spew draft
What stops us just writing?

"They feared that what they wrote would be
wrong and unspecified people would
laugh at them
Howard Becker

Have you got useful notes?
Good note taking helps you to avoid plagiarizing by mistake

Ballenger (2004) claims good papers start with good note taking.
As we write notes (with verbs!) we write parts of the paper, which
saves time.

Some note-keeping methods are
Researcher log book
Double entry note taking
Narrative note taking

Free writing
Write as much as you can about whats new?
for 5 minutes.

Just write.

If you are stuck for a word use another/different /
better word and keep writing

How to write 1000 words a day
Write new stuff just after breakfast and before lunch. Cut and paste free
writing into / around / through notes you already have.

Use pomodoro technique to focus (25 min writing sprints with 10 min breaks
between)

Take the afternoon off

Come back in the evening, outline, edit and rearrange your text


http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/how-to-write-1000-words-a-day-and-
not-go-bat- shit-crazy/

Day: Four


the scratch outline
The screen treatment method
Title: "Write an article in 7 days

explain why you should write articles
talk about the importance of doing research to find out the best place to
publish
Talk about different types of articles in academia
Talk about the importance of audience - explain how academic
audiences work
Introduce the idea of a tiny text as a way of focusing for your audience
Talk about the value of doing a spew draft


The Big List
Write everything you have as a list:
facts
issues
detail
Findings

Organise these in the best way to tell your
story then delete those that are not essential.

Day: Five


Cleaning up the mess

Time to reassess

Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your work so far.
Ask yourself:
Do I have enough literature?
Am I making knowledge claims or just reporting?
Is this an argument - or a manifesto?
Is my data sufficient to the claims I am making?
Am I being sufficiently speculative?

.

Excessive tinkering is a deferment strategy.
If you find yourself endlessly polishing and
not moving on, plan what to do the next day.
Go straight to that section next time you open
the document. At least you will be polishing
where it is needed.
Not working?

You might find yourself bouncing around
between these steps for awhile. It usually is a
sign that you didnt have enough stuff to make
the kind of paper you are aiming for, or you
lack confidence in your ideas.

Day: Six
Too wordy?
Zinsser suggests you put brackets around words which could be cut or replaced:

All writers (will have to) edit their prose, but (the) great writers edit (it)
viciously, always trying to eliminate (words which are) fuzz (excess) words
(which are not adding anything of value). Zinsser compares (the process of
editing out) fuzz to fighting weeds you will always be slightly behind (because
they creep in when you arent looking for them). One of my (pet hates) is (the
word) also. If you search and replace all instances (of this word) you will find
you can live without it and your writing will improve (instantly).(Likewise the
word)very.

Too many words?
Using the strike through tool - can you live without
it?
Moving some text to footnotes
Starting a maybe later folder
Triaging your text paragraph by paragraph
Performing bypass surgery

http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/5-ways-to-kill-your-
darlings/
Day: Seven
Kate Chanocks 7 stages of resentment
1. Outrage, noise, unlady like rejoinders
2. Incomprehension
3. More outrage
4. One or two of the comments might make sense
5. Theres a bit of truth in that one
6. Ill just have a go at doing what they said to do here
7. Actually, the paper is a whole lot better for all those
revisions.
How will I market this paper?
Your paper is one of thousands how can you get itto be
noticed? Some ideas:
Send it to authors you referenced
Tweet / blog about it
Lectures to professional gatherings
Write opinion pieces for the paper
Radio / TV
Make a film of it!

Some useful references on writing
Becker, Howard (2007) Writing for social scientists: how to start and finish your thesis,
book or article, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Ballenger, B (2011) The Curious Researcher, Longman
Becher, W (2009) Writing your journal article in 12 weeks, Sage.
Boise, R (2003) Professors as writers: a self help guide for productive writing, New Forum
Press Chanok, K. (2008). Surviving the reviewing process and getting published, Journal
of Academic Language & Learning. Vol. 2, No. 1.
Kamler, B & Thomson, P (2006) Helping doctoral students to write, Routledge, New
York. Murray, R (2009), Writing for academic journals, Open University Press. Rugg, G
& Petre, M (2010) The unwritten rules of PhD Research, Open University Press,
Maidenhead. Silva, P (2007) How to write a lot, American psychology association
White, B (2011), Mapping your thesis, ACER Press. Zinsser, W (2003), On Writing, Pan
McMillan.

Final thoughts
Writing a paper is what designers call a wicked
problem.

There are no right or wrong papers, just better and
worse ones. The more you write, the better your
papers will be.

We hope this presentation helps you write more and
more papers