Brush up your writing skills if you want to get published

At a Society for Research into Higher Education workshop on "Academic Writing Skills and Getting Published", session leaders stressed the need for new academics to develop good writing habits.

Simon Lygo-Baker of King's College London said that while researchers must get used to the fact that rejection by leading journals is the norm, they should also be aware that many rejected submissions don’t make the cut not because of a fault in the research, but because the submissions read like drafts rather than final papers. Scholars who apply some of the basic principles of good writing, including principles generally seen to apply to other forms of writing, will be putting themselves ahead of the game.

Academics are no different from other writers in their need for people to read and to remember what they write, said Lygo-Baker, and so they should “Give readers a hook or incentive at the start to grab their attention and get them involved” and “Summarise your central claim at the end, so that people take away something concrete."

Some basic principles of academic writing that Lygo-Baker said editors find to be too often forgotten include the need to pay attention to the style of a particular journal, to get to the point as succintly as possible, while addressing the major theoretical issues, and to offer conclusions that clearly arise from what has gone before. And of course, the work must be relevant or, as a reader of the article remarks online, “The best way to get published is to produce good work.”

Dr Rowena Murray of the University of Strathclyde was anxious to get the new academics at the workshop writing, stressing the importance of scholars being able to write on demand, of getting into the habit of grabbing any spare time and using it to write. She demonstrated how "writing to prompts" can help people to develop the behavioural techniques to get them started as academic writers, and how drawing consciously, for example, on set phrases such as "Some will argue that ..." or "Possible interpretations include ... " can help writers to package research in the most appropriate way.

So ... If you want to be an effective and productive writer, you should start writing now - just don’t let your first draft be your last.

Link to the full Times Higher Education article