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

Part of the reason students feel they need big blocks of time is because it takes them so long to silence their inner critic.

More than one authority has noted that “a well-prepared abstract can be the most important paragraph in your article” (APA 1994, 8).

The challenge for most, however, is that you must both shorten and lengthen the chapter. You must shorten because chapters are often twice the length of journal articles; but you must lengthen because the article must stand alone, unlike the chapter, and needs additional information.

is that they are driven by the data and not the argument.

“One usually gets better at whatever one does on a regular basis. If one does not write on a regular basis, one will get better at not writing. In fact, one will develop an astonishing array of skills designed to improve and extend one’s not writing.”

Don’t give a barrage of data without an argument or a conclusion; an abstract should tell (or at least hint at) a story.

An article abstract is a report on what you did do, not what you hope to do.

The writing research shows that those scholars with more than one writing project going at a time do better than those with only one (Boice 2000).

If you already feel guilty about not writing, you do what you can to avoid feeling even more guilty. The longer you go without writing, the less guilty you have to feel, because writing is clearly an impossible task. Following the exercises in this workbook and its model of a slow and steady pace should help overcome this feeling.