Writing a journal article in 12 weeks: Week Seven

I’m using Wendy Laura Belcher’s book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success to prepare my paper for publication. This is Week Seven.

Week Seven deals with presentation of evidence. First, Belcher talks about different types of evidence: qualitative, quantitative, historical, geographic, textual, and artistic. Then, she explains how evidence is presented in social sciences and in humanities. The part that I found most interesting and potentially helpful was Belcher’s advice to go beyond discovery of particular themes and to explore “how the text reproduces the conflicts of its period or culture, participates in constructing particular knowledge systems, or highlights social or political contradictions” (p. 198). I think my initial problems with the lack of a clear argument and the resulting data-driven nature of my paper (I mentioned that in Week Three) were caused by my inability to integrate, within the theoretical framework of the study, various connections, that I established between my findings and the socio-cultural processes, and to use those connections to develop an argument. Belcher’s explanation of argument as a statement with which you can agree or disagree helped me to put those connections together to form a skeleton of my paper, to which everything else now is attached.

Once again the week started with reading the workbook. On the second day, I talked to people in the communication studies discipline about what constitutes evidence in our field. I didn’t learn anything new, but those discussions helped me crystallize my thoughts. On the third day, I used Belcher’s instructions to review each paragraph of my paper to determine whether my evidence was clear, and whether my interpretation of that evidence was adequate and comprehensible. The rest of the week I spent reshaping my evidence around my argument. I had to go back to the interview transcripts and locate missing pieces of evidence. I still have several excerpts that need to be translated into English. Overall, my progress was slower than I wished, but I’m glad it’s been steady.