Week 4: reinvigorating your writing

Summary of learning activities

Re-write and redraft

Following the feedback on your draft, the next stage of the the process is to re-write and redraft. If you are novice to the writing for publication game then maybe this iterative process is surprising?

As an example of this process you may find Marion’s Story of a Publication interesting. It contains the first ever draft of the proposed article , a draft shared with the co-authors and includes their feedback and the final article as it appeared in the Journal of Online Teaching.

When you come to revise your draft it is a combination of taking on board the feedback that you have received from your partner reviewer and attention to what Belcher (2009) describes as ‘micro-structure revising’. This means attention to signposting, grammar, punctuation and spelling.

Receiving feedback can feel challenging and you my find it useful to look at Pat Thomson’s blog post Learning to receive reviewer feedback as a gift.

Murray (2013) suggests that it is important when revising drafts to pay attention to topic sentences and linking words. This relates very much to the overall structure of the work and also includes checking keyword matches with the proposed journal and abstract of the article or thinking about the aims of the thesis chapter and also ensuring that there is congruence with ideas introduced in the introduction and followed up in the conclusion.

One of the values that this course is based upon is that you will develop regular writing practice for your intended outputs. During this course you will have received feedback on your writing from others, it is worth considering where you might find this on an ongoing basis. Potential ideas are forming a local or online writing group and establishing a circle of critical friends. Marion’s approach to this for important writing outputs are feedback from an appropriate subject specialist, co-authors (as in the example above) and an objective outsider who can give feedback about interpretation of the paper in terms of meaning and spelling, punctuation and grammar. All of these approaches lead to a good combination of intellectual, moral and technical support.

The ultimate feedback that you will receive is when you submit your writing and receive reviewers comments. In our experiences you may receive feedback irrespective of whether your writing  is accepted for a publication. This is useful in preparing the article for an alternative audience. If your article is accepted that is fantastic news but you will invariably have comments to respond to and a limited amount of time in which to do this. A practical way to approach this is to devise a table with each of the comments and your responses. Belcher (2009) has developed a very useful template for this (PDF). 

Conclusion

Writing for a goal can be a lengthy process and it is easy to lose motivation especially when juggling other personal and professional responsibilities. For our final learning activity of the course we would like each of you to consider personal strategies that you use in order to complete projects. Given your learning about writing for publication during this course how might you adapt these for your personal writing projects. Post a summary on a Google slide that we can share online and discuss during the final webinar.

Further reading and resources on redrafting and rewriting