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Jan 10
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Overview
| The Study of Writing |
The Study of Publishing |
Objectives | Textbooks
Overview
This course looks at scholarly publication through the lens of the metaphor
of a conversation. That is, your scholarly writing is your attempt
to participate in a scholarly conversation that is going on in your field.
We will look at what the conversation is, and how your work adds to it. I
will ask you to select a writing project for your focus in the course. Our
goal during the course will be to revise and refine that project to get it as
close as possible to being ready to submit for publication.
The focus of this course is two-fold, as indicated by the title. The
overall goal is to cover writing as a way to build your academic
contribution to your field--to add to the knowledge making of your field, and to
cover publishing: the environment in
which you might publish, knowing requirements of various journals and other
publishing venues.
The Study of Writing
First,
we will cover the principles of scholarly writing.
To do this, we will look at what we call exemplars: model documents in
your field that make the kind of contribution you want to make. In this topic we will examine what it takes to move from
scholarly work to scholarly manuscript.
- Stages. This means understanding the stages of the scholarly writing
process and how that varies.
- Scholarly genres. We will also look at the types of scholarly
writing and the kinds of decisions one needs to make to select to work on
reviews, articles, notes, literature reviews, review articles, monographs, and
longer documents.
- Selecting topics and content. We will look at the decision-making
process for selecting topics and content and analyzing the audience for
scholarly writing.
- Composing strategies. Finally, we will look at issues of composing
strategy, organization, style, tone, and diction, and various documentation
styles required by various fields. We will look at strategies for
versioning and document archiving.
The Study of Publishing
The second focus of the
course is on the requirements for publishing in scholarly venues. To
do this, we will examine what are called conversants: articles written by
persons who are concerned with the issues you address in your writing.
Here we also look at journals, magazines, and publishing houses and learn how to
research these places where we publish.
- Selecting the right journal. We will examine how to analyze and
select the appropriate publications, and how to submit and manage the
publication process.
- Adapting to journal styles. We will examine various style guidelines
and the legal and ethical requirements for originality, protection of
stakeholders, and presentation of source materials.
Along the way in these two focuses, we will explore the nature of citations
as knowledge indicators, and the theories of knowledge making through
publication. We will also learn how to read scholarly publications
Objectives
- To understand what we mean when we say an article is an argument.
- To learn that it is possible to gain proficiency in scholarly publishing
beyond the ability to "write up research" and to understand the nature of
that proficiency.
- To learn that some scholarly writing is better than other scholarly
writing, and to be able to distinguish excellence from mediocrity in style,
organization, logic, and language.
The objectives of the course are to learn about and understand the issues and
topics indicated in the previous list. How we will go about that is
through a number of service-learning activities, writing assignments,
discussions, and other learning activities.
- The Scholarly Review Process. I will try to arrange for us to
participate in a real document review process. We may be able to do
this. Otherwise, we will review a process from first submission to
final acceptance.
- Review Workshop. I
would also like us to form review teams and review one another's work during the
semester, to simulate a real collaborative review environment such a often
occurs in a scholarly environment.
- Student Mentorships. I would also like for each student in the class to be assigned to a
professor in the academic community at TTU who is undergoing an article or major
publication project and for whom the student could act as part-time intern
during the semester. The internship would consist of reading, reviewing,
analyzing a journal, and other significant work that would represent a
contribution to the scholar's efforts and be a learning experience for the
student. I call these roles "student mentorships."
Textbook
- Writing for Scholarly Publication, by Anne Huff, Sage
Publications, Thousand Oakes, CA, 1999, ISBN- 0-7619-1805-1
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