Becoming an effective academic writer is one of the key challenges facing doctoral students and early career researchers. Despite the centrality of writing, few writers feel comfortable with the process or confident about their product. Rachael Cayley, author of the blog, Explorations of Style, discusses the anxiety that attends academic writing.
Should you publish your dissertation as a journal article or an academic book?
Once the dissertation is accepted, the question of whether to publish journal articles or an academic book is one that faces many new Ph.Ds aiming for faculty positions. When weighing these options, consider what is standard in your discipline, as some fields reward books while others reward journal articles. Your dissertation committee and director are excellent sources of advice on this question.
For most academic jobs where publications count, the stature of the publisher is crucial to the impact your publication will have on your career. Publishing with a university press known for its important titles in your field, will provide a superior impact. But a press that required a subvention on your part would be less valued.
Using scholarly models for academic writing
I’m not, of course, talking about simple imitation, or worse, plagiarism: the models are not there to replace our voice, but to help us find it. Models can help provide structure and ideas that we can adapt to suit our own ends and intentions.
We have to start writing with our own vision of what we want to accomplish, and our own sense of what is important and interesting. But that’s just a jumping off point. We need to focus these general interests and ideas into a specific project.
When writing your dissertation, look at it from several perspectives
The project is not the subject. The project is not the thesis. Whether you are writing your dissertation, a journal article, or a book, the project is not simply the thesis. When I ask people about their projects the answer I get is always (or almost always) the subject of the project. Sometimes I ask specific questions like “what kind of project? Is it a dissertation? A thesis?” And still the answer I get is the subject of the project. But your project is not just about a subject; it has a certain form. It is a journal article, a dissertation, a book. It has a certain intention—to share a discovery, to support a position, to instruct others. It is aimed at a certain audience—peers, or students, or educated lay people.
If you can see that form, and understand how that form relates to the work you’re trying to accomplish, then the writing process becomes much easier: it’s less a shot in the dark, and more a purposeful action.
How to extract articles from your dissertation
When I finally got around to writing my dissertation (that’s another story), I realized that its organization easily fell into several relatively self-contained chapters. Once I defended, I needed to convert as much of the dissertation to publishable articles as I could, for the “hound of tenure” was fast on my heels.
I realized that I had written each chapter with a possible article based on it already in mind. In philosophy one often takes on positions articulated by others, and seeks to attack them in a way that makes one’s own view more plausible and defended against those who would, or should, attack it. So, I “carved” the dissertation into three chunks and wrote them up as independent articles. I sent them to the same journals that had published the articles I was attacking, and they were accepted (usually subject to some revisions). Hence, my first three publications, followed by a fourth when one of my attackees sought to defend himself in print. Those, plus a couple of short pieces, secured a tenured appointment.
13-Step checklist for submitting dissertation, journal article
It may be intimidating to have to turn in a paper according to a specific set of style guidelines, but if you just follow a step-by-step process it’s not all that difficult. Here’s a basic checklist of the fundamental issues. It’s just a starting point, but check it against your style guidelines and you should be set. Style manuals are hundreds of pages; universities and journals often have additional specific requirements. But don’t be intimidated. There’s a lot of detail that you probably won’t face. This list is primarily aimed at dissertation writers, but the principles are the same for journals.