Abstract
How can one learn to write in a meaningful and effective way without making mistakes, editing drafts, and learning from experience gained over many years? While there is likely no way to avoid the above steps, picking up a copy of “Write It Up: Practical Strategies for Writing and Publishing Journal Articles” and using it as a field guide may help greatly. Written by Dr. Paul J. Silvia and published by the American Psychological Association, “Write It Up” is full of specific and helpful tips that manage to make the process of writing articles that get published seem less overwhelming and foreign to new writers and researchers. This book is an excellent read that passes quickly due to the very specific tips and examples offered and the humor with which those tips are delivered.
Dr. Silvia is an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and wrote the similarly helpful text “How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing” in 2007. While that guide focused on how to make writing more habitual and productive, this book focuses more on specifically techniques to be used during the writing, submission, and publication process of academic journal articles. Dr. Silvia argues that researchers should write for impact and not just for publication numbers and encourages researchers to be choosy with what they spend their time on. Silvia suggests that we earn a seat at one of the many tables of science by publishing work that influences the conversations happening within our scientific community and breaks down the steps to publishing in a systematic and easily digestible manner.
The book is organized logically based on the steps in writing and publishing that researchers must take. Part I, planning and preparing, has chapters on how and when to pick the right journal for your article and how to write accordingly for that journal and on how to hone your personal writing style so that it is best reflective of your work and ideas and more likely to be well received by your audience. In this section, he also suggests that writing for impact will automatically screen out the studies that will not be a good use of time and offers tips on how to work better with coauthors who are not working at the pace needed to finish the project by the agreed upon deadline.
Part II of the book follows the IMARD model and discusses specifics of writing the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections, with different formatting tips for the different types of rhetorical purposes of research. He gives templates and specific things to be sure to include in efficacy, explanatory, exploratory, and novel idea articles.
Dr. Silvia suggests that using a structured template to writing an introduction will make the writing more efficient, and reminds us that the goal of the paper should be included in the introduction. In the methods section, he reminds us that this is our chance to convince the reader that what we did was good and effective, which is a great way to think about reporting your process of research. He states that we should include evidence on the validity of our method and approach to our research question, and reminds the reader to err on the side of detail.
In writing about the results and discussion sections, Dr. Silvia points out that the results section is where we make our case and back up our reasoning with evidence. The discussion section is our chance to relate our research to theories, debates and larger issues in our field. He finishes the section by reminding us to recap our study in the discussion section and states that it is “abject madness” not to do so.
Also in Part II, Dr. Silvia discusses all of the “little things” that do not get the attention they may deserve from writers who focus on the meatier sections of a good journal article; he suggests that titles, references, footnotes, and abstracts are just as important parts of the article and deserve the same amount of attention.
Finally, in Part III, Dr. Silvia discusses the specifics of submitting your articles to journals, understanding the decision letters that are sent to the authors, revising and resubmitting, and how to build a body of work that is impactful. Throughout the book, Dr. Silvia preaches the idea of writing for impact, not just for publications to list on your vitae. As a new researcher, while this advice is solid and helpful in the long term, I can imagine that it may be hard to abide by when the temptation is there to just write and submit anything you can in order to get those publications listed. His continued emphasis in the book of writing for impact is a good reminder that while writing and publishing, new researchers will benefit from playing a long game and establishing themselves as respected researchers rather than just playing a numbers game of publishing with whomever will take their articles.
This book was clearly written, easy to understand, and surprisingly funny at times. The roughly 250-page book was short enough that one could read it in a night or two but well organized enough that one could also pick it up at any point and flip to a page and understand what was being discussed and the likely path that the author took to arrive there. Dr. Silvia uses humor as a mechanism to normalize some of the thoughts that we all likely have while researching, writing, and publishing, and at least for me, it worked. Reading this book helped to demystify the writing and publishing process and gave me comfort that all of the insane thoughts I have had about how this process works or how I would like it to work are thoughts that have been experienced by many others, also. I found this book quite helpful in a technical sense but also in that it made the research and publication process seem slightly less daunting. While it may not contain any new information for seasoned researchers and those with many impactful publications, it seems to be an invaluable tool for those of us just starting to build our impact network. For those researchers who are well established but not getting the publications they desire, this book could be a wonderful guide to get back to basics and perhaps to try some new techniques that may open new doors.
Overall, this book was an easy read and offered both specific tips and broad advice to researchers for writing and publishing journal articles. Dr. Silvia took what could have been dreadfully dry material and delivered it in an effective and humorous way and made the undertaking of writing and publishing seem somewhat less overwhelming in the process. This book would be a wonderful addition to the growing library of any new researcher and would be of great help to any students for whom research is a required part of coursework, as it will help to develop a solid foundation of good academic writing skills.