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Wendy Belcher’s new book on academic writing, Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success is not your average tome on scholarly productivity. It is, by appearance and admission of the author, a workbook—one that takes a graduate student or junior faculty member by the hand and leads him or her to successfully write an academic article in the Humanities or Social Sciences that can lead to publication. The author draws on her extensive experience conducting scholarly productivity workshops and background as an academic editor of a peer-reviewed journal to discuss academic writing and establish a regimen for scholarly productivity. Her purpose: to get graduate students and junior faculty published in a peer-reviewed journal. Belcher suggests revising an existing piece rather than starting from scratch with the promise that revising well will lead to better writing. To scaffold the revision process, the workbook is broken into 12 weeks, not chapters, each with its own collection of instruction, strategies for successful revising, and worksheets meant to get thinking or writing going. While addressing the sometimes-unsearchable field of scholarly writing and publishing, Wendy Belcher uses unpretentious, contemporary, and even witty prose that is simultaneously captivating and informative (“Writing is to academia what sex was to nineteenth-century Vienna: everybody does it and nobody talks about it” p. 1). While Belcher’s conversational and at times redundant approach may irritate readers who are seeking a pithy list of dos and don’ts, Belcher assumes that the reader is genuinely frustrated with the writing process and needs real, supportive instruction not idealistic axioms about composing and publishing. Another strength of this workbook is its macro-level explanation of daunting research tasks. For instance, Belcher describes how to read theoretical literature, how to give and receive feedback on writing, and how to interpret a response from a journal. On the other hand, some areas of her workbook seem disproportionately small: more than six pages on a good title versus just four paragraphs on writing your conclusion. What some may argue as a weakness of the book is in the design. It is a workbook, and as such, it is meant to be worked through. Some may feel constricted by a week-by-week guide to revising. Others may chafe at Belcher’s insistence that writing should become a habit by means of daily practice. But throughout the workbook, Belcher encourages, clarifies, and instructs the reader on ways to shape a poor piece of writing into a manuscript worthy of a peer-reviewed journal. Besides, the book’s presentation makes it easy enough for readers to target specific writing skills if they would prefer not to follow the suggested 12-week regimen. However, some areas of the workbook are nearly impossible to ignore because they touch honestly and unapologetically on issues such as why articles are rejected, questionable publishing outlets, and the perils of perfection. For her target audience of graduate students and junior faculty, these are likely areas of real ambiguity. Wendy Belcher’s book, Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks is an authoritative and approachable text. Although it was created and written as a workbook for graduates and junior faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Belcher suggests that the book could be used successfully as the text for a writing course. A class, she suggests, that would be very popular. After working through several of the weeks myself, I would agree. ----------------------------
Grant Eckstein received his teaching certificate and M.A. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at Brigham Young University. He is an English language teacher and an academic program supervisor at BYU’s English Language Center in the department of Linguistics and English Language. His fields of interest include non-native English pronunciation and writing.
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Reviewed by Grant Eckstein
