Writing journal articles can be demanding for an academic writer in any field, but authors seeking to publish their work in scientific journals face unique challenges.
Elaine Hull, a prolific writer in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, and Ushma Neill, an editor for The Journal of Clinical Investigation, offer the following advice for science writers:
In 2011 Pat Mason and I set out to establish a TAA chapter writing community at Molloy College. Making the time to come together during a semester to share our work is an awesome task for many of us, but we try to make it interesting for our colleagues by providing writing sessions, newly published books, and refreshments. In addition, we have adopted various useful mottoes—the best being “Less surfing and more writing!”
Summer vacation can be a great time for academic writers to get ahead on their writing projects, but all too…
There’s much to be said for e-journals. They save trees. Vast collections can be saved on a hard or flash drive, or on our newest shelf, the Cloud. Any of them can be read on an iPad or Kindle or a computer screen. Shipping costs are nil. Searching is incredibly easy. Entire libraries are accessible on line. An individual article can be purchased without a year’s subscription.
But e-journals have a couple of serious downsides: cost of publication and access, and journal issue preservation.
The after-the-fact outline provides a valuable strategy to help complete a major book or article revision. Sometimes referred to as a reverse outline, I learned of this strategy from Tara Gray, author of the book Publish and Flourish. I have tried most of the advice in her book, and now that I have tried this piece of advice, I had to ask myself: “Why did I wait so long?”
The first thing to point out is that this strategy is not a writing strategy, but a revising strategy. This strategy works best when you have a draft of your article (or a portion of your article) and are ready to rewrite it. It is best if your draft is rough, as you need to feel comfortable with the idea of deleting and/or rearranging large portions of it.
Lisa Moore, Principal, The Moore Firm, LLC:
“It’s very easy to apply for a copyright registration. You can do it online. The Copyright Office’s website is actually an excellent resource.
The process is changing. Back in the day, you had to fill out the form depending on what you were registering. The Copyright Office changed that, and they’re now utilizing one common form that can be done online. It’s much cheaper that way, $35 and you get your registration back much more quickly. If you mail in the old paper forms it takes somewhere between a year and two years to get it back, but if you do it online it’s somewhere between three and six months.
