Research as writing

 

Sjoe! Had a full day today! Workshop on "Turning a conference presentation into a publication" from 10am – 4pm, and then a supervision meeting immediately after that until 5:30 (separate instalment to follow tomorrow!). So I'm feeling exhausted but enthused about the road ahead and all its scholarly possibilities.

 

The workshop was presented by Pat Thomson, an Australian academic based at Nottingham University, who seems to be able, within a matter of seconds, to come up with just the right sentence to articulate that core point you've been stumbling over in a whole paragraph. Interestingly she framed her approach to writing for publication the following ways

• Research as writing
  
• Scholarly writing as text work/identity work
  
• Scholarly writing as dialogic
  
• Scholarly writing as discursive social practice
  

So her approach was very different from what she describes as 'tips and tricks' methodologies which present the whole process of writing for publication as a de-contextualised competence, simply involving a good understanding of the rules of the game, i.e. what the journal editors want in terms of structure and content. Her approach gets closer to the multiple elements that are needed when you write for publication in academia, including how identity as a scholar/academic is immersed in the act of writing. Of course she also placed emphasis on the practicalities of understanding the writing game such as picking the right journal, understanding the genre of the journal article, common problems etc…And in this respect provided a useful laundry list of question and concerns that should be addressed so you avoid the pitfalls of having your articles rejected (as if it were so simple!). We spent a considerable amount of time looking at writing abstracts for journal publication. A useful insight for me was that journal abstract need to be written in a different way from conference abstracts – "that's obvious" you might say – but it hadn't sunk in for me until today. She got us to write up an abstract that focused on five moves namely; locate (naming the angle), focus (identify what the paper will explore), anchor (establish the basis for the argument by outlining the research approach), report (summarise findings pertinent to the argument) and argue (open out the argument returning to the angle). A key insight that I took from the workshop was this notion that you have to take a stand and make a point through your writing (any writing that is, from the thesis, to a conference paper or a more high stakes journal article), engage and invite the broader community to enter into a conversation about your position and in so doing add to the knowledge in that community.

 

At a practical level, I started to construct an abstract and skeleton structure for a paper I want to present at the Higher Education Close Up (HECU) 5 Conference at Lancaster University in July 2010. I need to have a proposal ready for submission by the end of January 2010. I was forced to think about just ONE point I want to make about my MRes research. What makes it different from what has already been said in my field and how it might engage the broader academic community? I came up with it during the session. The draft while basic and in need of refinement in relation to its language, captures the main issue I think my MRes research highlights – addressing the "so what?" element associated with the research (I'll post it when it's slightly more polished).

I have to say that I'm somewhat cynical about the message promoted by people like Pat, who are experienced and well published, about the seeming simplicity of getting journal articles published. But I have to say I was inspired to focus on maybe one thing I wanted to say about my MRes research and hone this into a possible article (I also managed to get Pat to recommend possible journals that might be an appropriate platform). I have also been encouraged to look at the literature around writing as part of developing and projecting a scholarly identity – an area I previously avoided for fear that it merely presented a de-contextualised "how to guide" that almost also makes you feel inadequate because you don't manage to do all they say, or that fails to accommodate the many complexities associated with the act of academic and scholarly writing. We will have to see how all of that comes together.