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Wendy Laura Belcher: Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, Second Edition, 2019, 427 pp., $60.00, ISBN: 978-0-226-49991-8

• Book Review
• Published: 28 August 2019
• Volume 35 , pages 726–728, ( 2019 )

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• Karen Holt 1  

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Holt, K. Wendy Laura Belcher: Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success. Pub Res Q 35 , 726–728 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-019-09683-3

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Published : 28 August 2019

Issue Date : December 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-019-09683-3

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks A Guide to Academic Publishing Success

• Wendy Laura Belcher - Princeton University, USA

"Thorough, beautifully organized, and humane.  This is a welcome light on a dark process."

" Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks is the one book I would most recommend to inexperienced academic authors in the humanities or social sciences who seriously wish to see their scholarly work in print. Other books may be quicker to read, but I doubt if any would ultimately prove to be as effective."

"Belcher's book uses an interactive format to help writers develop a manuscript for submission from a pre-existing text such as a dissertation/thesis... When I used this book to teach writing for publication, doctorial students responded enthusiastically to the format and tone, which bolstered their confidence and enabled them to confront displacement activities."

"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."

Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks is an excellent guide for polishing research and writing articles for submission to academic journals or other types of publications. It is a great resource for graduate students as they learn to think through their writing and make writing accessible to academics and specific audiences.

Wendy Laura Belcher

Wendy Laura Belcher is an award-winning author, academic editor, international lecturer, and professor. She designed one of the first publication focused writing courses for graduate students and junior faculty in the nation, and for ten years has conducted such courses at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in research institutions around the world, including those in Norway, Malawi, Sudan, and Egypt. These popular workshops are based on her twenty years of experience as an academic editor, including eleven years managing an ethnic studies press and the peer-reviewed journal of record in the field, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, as well as her two master’s degrees in the social sciences and a doctorate in the humanities.

She is also a published nonfiction author, whose memoir about her childhood in Ethiopia and Ghana, Honey from the Lion: An African Journey, won a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award and honorable mention in the Martha Albrand/PEN Society Award for first book of nonfiction. She is now an assistant professor of African literature in the Princeton University Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for African American Studies.

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Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Second Edition

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Wendy Belcher

For ten years, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success has been the leading go-to source for those writing articles for peer-reviewed journals. It has enabled thousands to overcome their anxieties and produce the publications that are essential to succeeding in their fields. Each week, readers learn a particular feature of strong articles and work on revising theirs accordingly. At the end of twelve weeks, they send their article to a journal. This invaluable resource is a guide to publishing articles in the humanities; qualitative social sciences; social, behavioral, and health sciences; and the social science professions (such as education). The second edition of the workbook is expanded, addressing a wider range of scholars and disciplines, and adding three new chapters (including one on making claims for significance). It also provides two tracks through the workbook, one for those revising a text for publication and a different one for those writing an article from scratch, as well as allowing for different timeframes depending on the scholar’s schedule and the article’s state. The instruction is even easier to follow with more targeted exercises and specialized checklists. Finally, the workbook is updated with the advice of many users of the first edition; the new research about faculty productivity, scholarly writing, and citation; and the data about new journal processes. It still retains what readers liked about the first edition, especially its humor, encouraging tone, and stories. Key Features • Has a proven record of helping students and faculty publish. Developed by Belcher over two decades of teaching scholarly authors in a range of disciplines, the second edition is the refined product of repeated experimenting in the laboratory of the classroom, including beta-testing by a dozen scholars before final revision. Empirical evidence on the successful use of the first edition has been published in dozens of journals. • Proceeds step by manageable step: Within the context of clear deadlines, the workbook provides the instruction, exercises, and structure needed to write an article from scratch or revise a classroom essay, conference paper, dissertation chapter, master′s thesis, or unfinished draft into a journal article and send it to a suitable journal. • Targets the biggest writing challenges: This workbook focuses squarely on the most difficult tasks facing scholarly writers, such as getting motivated, making an argument, and creating a logical whole. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks can be used individually or in groups, and is particularly appropriate for graduate student professional development courses, junior faculty orientation workshops, post-doc groups, and journal article writing courses.

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This essay provides an introduction to publishing in the humanities for junior scholars at the start of their careers and beyond. It reflects on how our relation- ships to publishing change along our career paths. Indeed, while the focus on publications is significant during our junior years and continues after tenure, the pressure feels more intense and the possibility of publishing for promotion to full professor seems more elusive at the same time. The author confesses her own struggle in writing a second book. Transcending that hurdle—from associate to full—is, arguably, the most difficult challenge for most academics, particularly for women of colour, whose numbers remain abysmal at the rank of full professor. The essay provides a number of insights and strategies, taken from the author’s experiences, discussions with other academics, and research, for successful publish- ing and promotion in the academy.

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Home » Evaluating » Getting Published in the Field of Instructional Design and Technology and Faculty Development

Getting Published in the Field of Instructional Design and Technology and Faculty Development

by Shelly Wyatt , Ph.D. and Roslyn Miller , Ph.D.

When we publish findings and recommendations in our field, we advance our body of knowledge—not only for our peers, but for the public as well. Publishing benefits the authors too by advancing their own career opportunities and establishing themselves as experts in their field. ~ Roslyn Miller

Instructional design and online faculty development is a robust area of research and publication, with many options for publishing findings and recommendations. Outcomes-driven papers rely on data shared by stakeholders, including faculty, students, and instructional designers/faculty developers.  Sources of data include survey results, answers to interview questions, observations, and performance-related artifacts.  Experience-driven papers focus on the phenomena of instructional technology and design and faculty development in various contexts: formal faculty development courses, individual faculty support, course reviews for quality, and accreditation reviews for online programs.  For example, an experience-driven paper might include the process of updating a long-standing online faculty course along with lessons learned that might inform future course updates or redesigns.  Finally, there are opportunities to publish digital articles. For example, University of Central Florida’s Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository releases an annual call for high-quality examples of online and hybrid teaching strategies. Similarly, TOPkit issues a Call for Contributions each spring, an excellent opportunity to publish online content related to faculty development. 

Not to be overlooked as an additional source of data for publication: instructional designers and online faculty developers.  The expertise and experience of instructional designers and online faculty developers are in-demand, and publication of the outcomes of their efforts offers valuable insights. Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez (2021), in their chapter titled “ Instructional Designers Leading Through Research ,” offers many excellent examples of ID tasks that can be transformed into research. 

Where to Start

If you are searching for a topic, look close to home: what projects have you worked on this year?  With whom have you worked?  If you have worked on a group project, consider asking a colleague to collaborate on a paper.  Other sources of topics include calls for proposals from journals and professional organizations.  For example, Online Learning Consortium and AECT post calls for proposals. Another option to consider is collaboration with a colleague.  Potential co-authors include fellow instructional designers, teaching faculty, graphics and video staff, and librarians. 

How to Finish

• Select the right journal . Consult the journal’s website and review the “scope of the journal” to determine if the journal is a right fit for your paper.  One of the most frequent reasons an article is rejected by a journal is that the article is outside the scope of the journal.  You can also use the Belcher Journal Evaluation Form to analyze the journal. 
• Check formatting and submission requirements . Be sure to check formatting and submission requirements and documentation style for your selected journal.  This information is commonly posted on the journal website. 
• Edit your article . Upon acceptance, make time on your schedule to respond to editorial feedback. 
• Respond to rejection . The rejection of an article by a journal does not mean the article is unworthy of publication!  Reconsider the potential audience for your article and select another journal that might be a better fit.  Also, review any feedback that a journal provides and revise accordingly.   

Research and publication in the field of instructional technology and design, faculty development, and online teaching and learning is a robust segment of academic inquiry. Experience-driven papers as well as outcomes-driven papers constitute impactful contributions to the growing body of literature in the field of instructional technology and design and online faculty development. 

Belcher, W. (2019). Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: A guide to academic publishing success . https://wendybelcher.com/writing-advice/writing-your-journal-article-in-twelve/  

American Library Association. (2021). A selective list of journals on teaching and learning. https://acrl.ala.org/IS/instruction-tools-resources-2/pedagogy/a-selected-list-of-journals-on-teaching-learning/  

Taylor and Francis. (2022). How to write a journal article . https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-research/writing-your-paper/writing-a-journal-article/  

Association for Educational Communications and Technology. (2022). News, events, and activities . https://aect.org/aectnews.php  

Belcher, W. (2019). Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: A guide to academic publishing success . https://wendybelcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Belcher-Journal-Evaluation-Form.pdf  

Center for Distributed Learning, University of Central Florida. (2017). Teaching online pedagogical repository . https://topr.online.ucf.edu  

Jaramillo Cherrez, N. (2021). Instructional designers leading through research. In J. E. Stefaniak, S. Conklin, B. Oyarzun, & R. M. Reese (Eds.), A practitioner’s guide to instructional design in higher education . EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/id_highered/instructional_designV   

Online Learning Consortium. (n.d.). Announcements: Online Learning Journal . https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/read/online-learning-call-papers/

Teaching Online Preparation Toolkit (TOPkit). (n.d.). https://topkit.org/community-forum/call-for-contributions/

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Book Review: Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, by Wendy Laura Belcher

by Jonathan Adjemian

Published at 2019-09-04

For academics across disciplines, writing and publishing journal articles is an unavoidable part of professional life. Anyone who’s been or been close to a scholar starting out in their career, struggling to find work, or approaching tenure knows that the need to publish can be a tremendous source of stress. The huge field of journal publishing can seem arbitrary and impersonal, and the connection between quality of thought and acceptance for publication can seem elusive or non-existent.

Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) offers a practical course in demystifying journal publishing and its place in scholarship, while guiding the reader in preparing an article for submission. In the book’s first edition, published by Sage in 2009, Belcher, professor of African literature at Princeton University with appointments in Comparative Literature and African American Studies, wrote with scholars in fields close to her own in mind. The book’s success prompted this expanded and revised second addition, which provides informed and discipline-specific advice for papers across academic fields, including medicine, the sciences, the quantitative and qualitative social sciences, and the humanities. Belcher outlines trends and provides history and explanation for current practices in publishing, giving an insider’s perspective to facilitate access — and as women and people of colour continue to be underrepresented in the all-important metrics of article publishing, the issue of access is important in establishing work hierarchies in academia.

A Full Course in One Book

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks is a workbook; while the book is over 400 large-format pages long, reading it is only a small part of the work, which includes exercises in shaping arguments, surveying a field, choosing an appropriate journal, revising argument, structure and language, and finally submitting the article. Using a common twelve-week course design, the workbook calls for a time commitment of at least six to eight hours a week, and Belcher recommends readers work through the book in groups ( Writing Your Journal Article would also work very well as a course text, as Belcher and others use it). The book is full of worksheets, detailed exercises, and feedback and reflection questions to help readers prepare their article for publication and in the process learn to understand the whys and hows of academic journals and their publishing practices.

The book assumes that readers are beginning with a piece of writing — for instance a course paper or dissertation chapter — that they will revise into a publishable article over the twelve weeks. A supplementary “Chapter 0” helps readers without a draft in hand get to this stage, although this potentially lengthy task falls outside the twelve weeks. While this might seem like a significant issue, the book’s target audience — beginning scholars looking to land their first publication — are probably much more likely than not to have a piece of writing ready for revision.

Practical, Detailed, and Balanced Information

Belcher takes a very practical approach to writing, while acknowledging how difficult it can be and identifying common problems. She acknowledges complicated feelings around writing, how difficult it can be to establish discipline, and how common fears and insecurities can affect writing choices. The book offers detailed and no-nonsense discussions of important and sensitive fields like plagiarism, the politics of citation, and journal rankings. The ideas are consistently linked to practical exercises, all of them directly part of the process of revising and submitting the article. Many exercises involve work or interaction with peers, other scholars, and journal editors; advice on how to conduct these communications is included.

The level of detail is impressive throughout. The impressive diversity of examples helps scholars from different fields connect the book to their work, while also contextualizing practices a scholar may know from there field within broader academic practice. Belcher is sensitive to a range of learning types and writing styles, even suggesting places where some people might want to veer from the book’s proposed structure. But overall, the structure — moving from refining argument and contextualizing in the field, to finding the right venue for publication, to structural and argumentative revisions, and then to “microrevision” or fine-tuning language — follows a well-thought-out path, designed with pedagogical and practical value in mind.

A Specific but Highly Valuable Resource

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks is full of information that would be useful to anyone involved in academic writing and publishing. But, as Belcher reminds us often, the book really needs to be put into practice to have its full value. And while there’s lots of solid advice on writing and structure, the book focuses very specifically on argumentative essays written for publishing in academic journals, and does not provide a guide to other types of writing and publication. But for its target audience, Belcher’s book offers a remarkable learning opportunity.

University of Chicago Press is famous for publishing writing guidelines in its Manual of Style , but the Press also maintains a strong collection of other books on writing that combine practical advice and thoughtful explanation. (I’ve reviewed a couple of others here and here ; on academic writing in general also see the recent post by guest blogger Mary Goitom, PhD.) Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks offers a demanding but very well-presented opportunity especially for young scholars looking to make their way into the complicated and sometimes intimidating world of article publishing.

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