Revising your draft into a publishable journal article in 12 weeks [Book Review]

Another very useful book about academic writing that I want to discuss with you is Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (Second Edition, University of Chicago Press, 2009/2019). This book is a practical workbook and has gone through many iterations, so it’s not based on Belcher’s pet theory of how you should do academic writing but rather on the tried and tested practices of the many users of the book over the years. It’s great for beginners, guiding them through the entire process of writing a paper and making it publishable, or at least ready for submission. Despite the title, the book focuses on revising a draft to make it publishable. However, you can use it even if you don’t have any draft to revise yet. It also includes background information or tacit knowledge about publishing that you may not yet have as a beginner. However, the book is popular with academic writers in all stages of their professional development.

On the book and its motivation

Belcher notes that writing- or publishing-related skills seem to be implicitly taught or otherwise transmitted to some privileged people. She observed that her classes were particularly popular with women, people of color, and those from non-academic backgrounds who frequently struggle because no one has ever explicitly taught them these skills before. I can relate to this myself. Despite being privileged in many ways, I felt that the writing skills necessary to publish in top international journals were never directly taught to me, so it’s great to learn them in such a structured format through Belcher’s book.

The book is highly recommended, though it is a bit expensive and quite large. Don’t get discouraged—it’s designed as a 12-week program, requiring one to three hours five days a week or respectively circa seven hours in total each week. It recommends spending at least 15 minutes a day on your project, even on days when you’re too busy to actively work on it. Investing no more than 15 minutes daily is likely to extend the timeline beyond 12 weeks, but it still keeps you moving forward a little each day, even in stressful times. Belcher, like other experts on academic writing, stresses the importance of writing regularly and warns against the fallacy that you need a fully formed idea to start writing. Writing itself helps shape your thinking, so the key is to get something on the page and revise it later.

Belcher’s article drafting outline template

If you don’t have a draft yet Belcher also offers an article-drafting outline to develop an initial idea (or Try our Article Outline Template Challenge!). Her outline includes the following elements:

• Subject of investigation: What am I studying?
• Methods: What is my approach, methodology, and/or theory?
• Literature review: Whose research is mine in dialogue with, and how does it motivate my research?
• Question/problem/puzzle: What am I trying to answer?
• Results: What have I found, or what do I hope to find through my research?
• Significance: What do my findings help us understand, and why are they important? How do they solve a problem?
• Argument: What is my argument as I understand it right now?

What are you in for?

Given that buying this huge book sets you back around 60€ and that it takes a discouraging amount of pages to even get an idea of what you’re in for (you need to read the introduction and a good part of weeks 0 and 1 to get started), I thought a short overview might be in order.

Belcher’s Week 1 begins with creating a writing plan and addressing feelings about writing. She explains that many writers are usually imagined as working alone in private but academic writing should be collaborative. If writing makes you feel anxious, know that these anxious feelings are justified because writing is difficult. Belcher suggests identifying specific fears and provides exercises to help with that (if you think psychological barriers to writing may be your biggest issue, look into Write through psychological barriers? [Book Review, Part II]).

Like many others such as Mazak and Silvia, Belcher also emphasizes the importance of creating positive writing experiences. Successful academic writers write regularly and most negative feelings “about writing” actually come from procrastination—i.e. from not writing. Like with exercising or eating healthy, developing a writing habit and setting realistic goals leads to progress in the long run. Studies show that even people who feel “too busy” often spend lots of time on unproductive activities that are neither work nor play. To tackle this, Belcher suggests spending one week tracking how you use your time, which can be a useful productivity exercise even beyond writing.

Write regularly

Successful writers don’t wait for inspiration or large blocks of time. Belcher recommends writing five days a week, with a minimum of 15 minutes per day. Writing most days is essential and even writing in accumulating 15-minute blocks can be highly productive. She warns against the trap of thinking you need large, uninterrupted chunks of time to write; instead, she designed this book to accommodate writing within the constraints of everyday life. You can reach your writing goals even during busy times by dedicating one to three hours per day, five days a week, depending on how much revision or new research is needed. Short, frequent sessions keep ideas fresh, at the forefront of your thoughts and the momentum going. Some may prefer longer writing sessions, but writing for more than four hours is unrealistic for most.

Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary activity. Belcher encourages joining writing buddies, groups, workshops, or article-reading clubs. Feedback from others can help catch omissions or logical gaps in your writing early on. It also prepares you for peer review, a subjective and often biased process that often involves rejection. Nobody likes rejection but it’s part of the process. You need to learn to deal with it. She stresses that persistence, rather than inherent or perceived values like worthiness, is key to becoming a published author.

Read widely

Reading journal articles is also crucial, as it helps you internalize the language and conventions of the field, improving your writing in both form and content. In a course she teaches, she asks students to select a peer-reviewed journal each week, review five years of titles and abstracts, read several introductions, and focus on five full articles. Reading journal articles helps writers produce publishable work and stay current with their field. For those who don’t read much, Belcher recommends starting small—perhaps reading one page before bed, or for 15 to 30 minutes—whatever fits your routine. Academics should aim to read or skim three articles per week, dedicating at least one to three hours to reading.

Belcher also advises following your passion when selecting a research topic. Writing about what fascinates you makes the process more enjoyable and helps you better endure rejection (which almost inevitably comes with writing and publishing). Avoid simply following trends or recommendations that don’t interest you much (if you lack passion for your topic, you may not have the grit required to go through with the often lengthy process of getting an article published), but also be open to making suggested topics your own: they may become more engaging the more you learn about them.

Get started by scheduling writing

Belcher stresses that the most unrealistic writing schedule is no schedule at all. Without a plan, you can’t expect your article to be written or revised, and you shouldn’t rely on the hope that it will get done without one. To start your project, she recommends setting up a writing schedule. To do that effectively, you first need to find out where your time currently goes each week.

Belcher also provides multiple calendar templates, some of which can be downloaded, to plan your writing schedule. One template is for planning your writing sessions during the week, while another is a 12-week calendar designed to help you map out your article writing schedule. The 12-week calendar has columns for each day where you can track how much time you’ve spent writing, with rows representing the weeks. Belcher provides a flowchart to estimate how long the article writing process will take, depending on whether you have 4, 8, or 16 hours a week for writing, and whether the article needs minor, medium, or major revisions, or is being drafted from scratch. If you want to finish the process earlier than 12 weeks, you need to complete more of the chapters at a faster pace. The amount of revision your paper requires will determine how much time you need.

She advises choosing a time of day when you are most alert and energetic, respecting your biorhythm. The goal is to commit to writing five days a week for 15 minutes to two hours per session, based on the 12-week plan and the state of your paper.

She also recommends attaching your writing activity to another daily task, such as arriving at the office, which is similar to advice I have also read in many other writing books by Sylvia, Mazak and even Cal Newport, who all share their own examples for how and where they find time to write. Newport also advises using a specific recurring time and place for writing, to help form a habit or ritual, which he discusses in How to Become a Straight-A Student and his more recent work on Slow Productivity. I personally tie my writing to my morning routine.

Conclusion

According to Belcher, revising a draft is one of the best ways to improve your writing. To use this book, you need to find a piece of work that contains the seed of a publishable article. Belcher is quite adamant that most of us can already find that seed in our past work.

Given that the book costs around 60 euros, it’s understandable that you might hesitate to buy it if you’re not sure you’ll follow through with the program. I had it lying around for a while (years) before even opening it, but now Astrid are going to try it out as writing buddies.

We’ll let you know how it goes.

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