I was asked last week to cut my HERD article down by 1000 words. Because my article included four diagrams and images and was thus going to exceed the prescribed page length for an article, the editor-in-chief started to make some noises about the suitability of its inclusion. This 'request' came a few days after I was told that my implementation of APA was scrappy and incomplete. And it was scrappy and incomplete, so I sat and manually corrected my references - every pain staking comma and full stop. This week I cut about 900 words out of my original article and I'm sitting here wondering - was it really worth it, just so I can get published? I re-read the article and all the interesting bits, the students voices, the complexity that is the context is gone. Of course I can argue that I need to write more precisely and learn to cut out the unnecessary comments, the repetition and focus on making the argument come through clearly - but then the writing, the story, the narrative, the voices (mine and those of the context) is somehow lost. One of my supervisors always says that writing for journals is a soulless exercise because you have to strip your research down to the bone and you can never really tell the story, the complete story that is your research. Another of her little bugbears is the fact that visual texts are inadequately accommodated by journal editors - my experience is obviously a case in point. She is going to love it when I tell her my story next week.
So I stripped the article to the bone and it will be published, under a slightly altered title too...yes another recommendation, which I did however contest somewhat. So that's Editors 2 : Lynn 1 - I guess its the best outcome I could hope for as a novice research and writer "she says in a cynical and unimpressed tone"
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