Need a guide to the wilds of academic publishing? Want to write for publication more quickly and easily? If you’re in the humanities or social sciences, look no further than Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, which can help you
- Avoid writing blocks
- Control the literature review
- Strengthen the structure of your work
- Get, give, and use feedback effectively
- Navigate the journal publishing process
My favorite go-to features include:
- An instant argument generator
- The most amazing diagnostic scheme for targeted sentence-level editing (every time I use it my writing gets dramatically better!)
- A journal editor’s perspective on what’s publishable, and why
Every chapter of this book is packed with proven methods from Belcher’s workshops for faculty and graduate students. Implementing even a few of her suggestions might turbocharge your writing!
Quotable:
“Our ability to read even a fraction of what is published in our discipline is limited….It is essential then to abandon the hope of being comprehensive in your reading. No one is reading everything in his or her discipline. If you stop feeling guilty about what you are not reading, you can start a plan for reading what you can.”
~Belcher (2009) Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, p. 141.