The most useful textbook & academic posts of the week: December 8, 2017

This week our collection of articles from around the web contains innovative practices and changes in the publishing industry, suggestions for Open Education, ways to repurpose your finished research into a journal article, academic friendships, social media impacts on author and publisher success, and actions to reduce predatory publishing practices.

As we come to the end of the first week of December, a month where many of our writing projects are faced with increased struggle as academic terms come to an end, remember the words of Nona Mae King, “Writing is more than a gift. It is a struggle that blesses those who see it through to the end.”

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6 of Dr. Onwuegbuzie’s 30 steps to publishing in scholarly journals

In part 1 of his two-part webinar, “A 30-Step Guide to Publishing in Scholarly Journals”, Dr. Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Sam Houston State University, and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg, shared insight into his 30-step process, which he calls a meta-framework for publishing with steps that are “continuous, iterative, interactive, holistic, dynamic, and synergistic”.

The following steps are six of the 30 he shared: selecting a topic of interest, determining the outlet and audience, deciding on whether collaboration is needed/feasible, choosing the outlets for publication, and writing the work.

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The most useful textbook & academic writing posts of the week: February 19, 2016

What sorts of strategies do you use to catapult you into your day’s writing? Do you do as Jerry Jenkins does and start the day with “a heavy edit and rewrite” of the “previous day’s work”? Maybe you do as Rachel Toor suggests: “leave off at a point where it will be easy to start again.” Rachel adds: “Some writers quit a session in the middle of a sentence; it’s always easier to continue than to begin.” Various other writers suggest using bullet points at the end of a writing session that point them in the direction they want the writing to go when they next return to it. Perhaps you have a completely different method altogether. If you do, I hope you will share it in the comments below this post. Happy writing!

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Stretch, reach and fall back: Targeting your submission to the journal

Deciding where to submit your journal article can be a daunting task. Not all journals are created equal. Journals differ in content and, of course, in the more elusive, status within the discipline. What I will write about here is how to select and refine your submission based on the journal’s status within your discipline. Two strategies can smooth out the submission process. The first strategy illustrates one way to decide on the journal in which you want to publish. The second strategy is how to analyze the articles within that selected journal to focus your writing to that audience.

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