Your research is done. You have a solid first draft. Now, where will you submit your paper?
Authors will either have a quick answer or struggle to figure out which is the best fit for their work. I suggest you put nearly as much time into thinking through the best match for your work as you did in creating it.
Start to develop a list of possible publications for submission. Potential journals will migrate up and down your list as you learn more about each one.
Nothing is quite so sweet as seeing that block on your calendar that says, “Vacation,” or “Holiday.” Of course, it comes with some stressors, but oh, that time away.
One of those nagging items that accompany time off may be your writing. Hopefully, you have set a schedule or timeline for when your next milestone needs to be completed. The holidays in particular can present both opportunities and pitfalls. The key to determining which path you will go down is having a plan.
Many people once the time off starts will need a day or so to decompress and turn off the noise of work or the office. Completely understandable. But the goal is not to let a day turn into three days or into ten continuous hours of Netflix or….
How is your schedule?
If you are like the rest of the people I know, you either:
Feeling pushed to the max is the number one response I get nowadays when I ask someone about where they are with their writing and work.
How often do you talk to your computer?
Last month I discussed the growing sophistication of programs that read your writing aloud from word processing programs such as Word or Pages.
Now, let’s look at the programs that allow you to speak your words into your work without using your fingers. Some might be old school enough to remember the first clunky dictation software. It involved a CD-ROM and lots of instructions and commands. Well thankfully the industry has greatly improved while becoming infinitely easier to implement.
Authors have some tremendous tools at their disposal. Powerful bibliographic management software as well as programs to create eye-popping bar charts are just a couple examples. Some of these tools get a lot of buzz. But there are some features of old standards that can surprise.
All of the major word processing software programs offer a Read Aloud feature. This feature reads to you the text you have written. I will speak about Microsoft Word, but these points are true for most of the other word processing programs available on computers or online.
You meant business. You gathered all of your research materials and notes. You came up with a plan and set a timeline. You had two solid sessions writing and made some good progress. Things were moving along. Yes, deadlines to disseminate your research and work were looming but the train was moving forward.
Then life started to intervene.
