So many people struggle with basic aspects of writing for peer-reviewed social science journals, mostly because we (often) don’t teach what goes where. /1
There are a lot of good books on this (recs included in link). I also have two short chapters, one from RQSS and one from my next book, on this written for law and society and criminology folks (among others). Both are linked on my site. /end https://ashleytrubin.com/resources/
(1) It’s our job as mentors to give feedback to our students; don’t outsource it. (2) We have a reviewer shortage; review times are pretty long these days. (3) At LSR, we won’t send out an article if it’s not ready to go out (they get a reject and resubmit or a desk reject).
https://x.com/ashleytrubin/status/1843024073255010482
A colleague recently criticized a departmental effort to teach writing to our grad students because “we all learned to write without someone teaching us.” Let me explain why they’re wrong.
(1) I struggled hard to learn how to write journal articles. I even took multiple courses/workshops where we read and critiqued each other’s papers. While I’m sure I “absorbed” some things, I still struggled.
And yes, I published two articles in grad school, but I hadn’t actually figured it out–I just had a lot of feedback and ultimately got lucky. It took me years post-grad school to actually figure out how to write journal articles.
Ultimately, I got much better when I read a fuck ton of books on how to write where people explained it in the book. I also attended numerous trainings on writing over the years.
These books and trainings covered everything from the template/outline for an article, what each section is accomplishing, how to write an abstract, tricks for more comprehensible paragraphs, and grammar.
It would have been so much easier and better if I’d gotten that training early on. TBH I felt like such an idiot so much of the time. I couldn’t understand some of the feedback I’d gotten, I didn’t know how to respond to a lot of it. I floundered a lot.
(2) For someone who claims to be a progressive/liberal, this is sure a conservative take.
Today’s grad programs are accepting a wider range of students from more diverse backgrounds and different levels of preparation. If we want them to succeed, we have to actually teach them stuff that they need to succeed.
We can’t admit people and let them flounder and then wonder what happened. This is part of the thrust behind the whole hidden curriculum conversation. Also, why make someone’s life harder when you can make it easier? Don’t be a dick.
(3) As an editor, I can assure you, a lot of people don’t know how to write journal articles. There are conventions designed to improve communication and people are not sticking to them, most likely because they don’t know about them.
So while “we all learned to write,” such that we can submit a manuscript, we didn’t learn to write well.
(4) You can always learn to write better. I’m still learning, and I’m a fucking journal editor. Let’s not stop with what you think is good enough (and again, we’re not actually at “good enough”).
Post Script: The steel-man argument against teaching writing is if you are good enough you will figure it out and we should weed people out that way. As
@RubinActual
likes to point out, we aren’t playing Mao; if some are told the rules, all should be told the rules.
And since folks are asking, I maintain a list of recommended resources for writing, productivity, and research methods on my website. I also try to tweet out advice regularly.
Ashley T. Rubin 