The
Ten-Week Course
I no longer teach this course regularly. This
course is a guide to the complex world of academic publishing
and is designed to give writers practical experience in
getting their work published in academic journals. One of
the first course-length workshops in the country with such
a focus, it has helped participants get work into such leading
journals as Political Geography, World Politics, World
Development, PMLA, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of
American History, Journal of Gerontology, Semiotica, Language
in Society, and Popular Music, to name just
a few. The goal of this workshop is to aid participants
in taking their papers from classroom or conference quality
to journal quality and in overcoming anxiety about academic
publishing in the process.
During
the workshop, the instructor explains the publication process
and shares strategies for achieving success in the academic
writing arena, including setting up a work schedule, identifying
appropriate journals for submission, clarifying arguments,
organizing material, working with editors, using citation
software, and writing query letters. In a supportive environment,
participants are led through a rigorous revision of an already
written academic paper. They complete weekly assignments
of reading and writing, receive feedback on that writing
from the instructor, and then actually submit a final draft
of the article to an academic journal.
The
class is part lecture, part workshop, that is, a combination
of learning and doing. Thus, participants are expected to
bring a copy of the paper to every class. By the fifth week
of the course, participants are expected to submit a paper
that has received some positive responses from a colleague.
(I discourage participants from enrolling who plan to write
the paper over the course of the class; this class is not
intended for drafting.) Four weeks after that, participants
are expected to turn in revised versions of their papers.
Participants revise again and then bring final versions
of their papers, ready to be mailed, to a post-class dinner.
Instructor
Dr. Wendy Laura Belcher has taught this workshop to hundreds at UCLA and around the world since 1998. Belcher designed the workshop based on her long-term experience as an editor and author as well as her graduate work in both the social sciences and the humanities. She worked for over a decade editing peer-reviewed journals and books for academic presses (including Oxford University Press, the University of California Press , and Routledge) and is now assistant professor of African literature at Princeton University. She is an award-winning scholarly writer and most recently has published Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (Sage 2009).
Participants
The
host university dictates who can enroll. Those who most
benefit are (1) graduate students who want to publish an
essay they wrote for the classroom or part of their master's
thesis, (2) doctoral candidates hoping to publish a chapter
from their dissertation in progress, and (3) recent doctorates
and junior faculty under pressure to publish for jobs or
tenure. Enrollment is limited. No more than twenty participants
will be accepted into each workshop.
At
UCLA
I no longer teach this
workshop to UCLA students in the humanities and social
sciences through the UCLA Summer
Research Mentorship Program.
Syllabus
For
information about the syllabus, web resources, and texts,
click here.
