Publishing your Article in 8 Weeks

This is a workshop for those who have a rough draft of something that they want to publish in an academic, peer-reviewed journal (or something they want to revise into a publishable paper). The class meets for one and a half hours once a week for 8 weeks.

Participants revise this draft (often a classroom paper, conference paper, or dissertation chapter) into a peer-reviewed article and submit it for publication. The goal of this course is to aid participants in revising their papers into a publishable peer-reviewed article and in overcoming anxiety about academic publishing.
There's no simple formula for getting published. But there are some challenges that confront all academic writers regardless of their discipline. 

The course uses Wendy Laura Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, to examine the publication process and shares strategies for publishing success. These include:

• setting up a realistic time frame for your writing process
• identifying, understanding, and clarifying arguments and claims for significance
• opening and concluding your article
• restructuring your article
• identifying appropriate journals for submission
• working with editors, writing query letters

Some course details:

• The class is part lecture, part workshop, that is, a combination of learning and doing. Please bring Belcher's book (or e-book) to every online meeting. We will work with this book all the time.
• You cannot wait to read the workbook until the night before class, because it has daily tasks you must complete.
• You will be writing every week, either in revising your text or in writing new text. But you should be writing every week anyways.
• There is an average of 35 – 50 pages of reading per week.
• You have a few oral presentations, but nothing very serious. The philosophy of this course is that writing is best done as a social process, so we will work on working together.