ENGL 5390: Writing for Publication
Fall 2012
Section 002: T 6:00 - 8:50 in 202

Dr. Marta Kvande

Course Description
This is a pragmatic course focusing on the process of preparing an essay for submission to a peer-reviewed journal and on professional activity more broadly. Students must begin the course with a previously-prepared article-length critical paper (5,000 to 7,000 words), usually one from a previous graduate course. Revising this essay for publication (including peer workshops and other revision practices) will be one of the major projects of the course. In addition, students will also learn and practice other aspects of the scholarly process, such as preparing and presenting conference-length papers, determining appropriate venues for their work (both conferences and journals), composing cover letters, applying for grants, writing book proposals, and writing book reviews, among other scholarly genres and conventions. As they learn more about the process of professionalization, students will also develop research agendas to help encourage their professional success. This course satisfies the requirement in Professional Development.

Expected Learning Outcomes
On completion of the course, students should be able to locate and assess scholarly venues in particular fields to determine their suitability for the student’s own work; analyze and assess published articles in terms of the strategies, approaches, and conventions each uses; revise and edit discipline-appropriate prose in the student’s own writing; engage in thoughtful and responsible peer-reviewing of fellow students’ work in progress; understand and be able to use different scholarly citation formats; engage in appropriate, discipline-specific formal reviewing of published scholarship by preparing and submitting a book review; prepare a scholarly article for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, including preparing a cover letter and article abstract. These outcomes will be assessed by means of the assignments as detailed below.

Required Texts
MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 3^rd ed. ISBN 978-0-87352-297-7.
Your previously prepared critical essay of 5,000-7,000 words. (NB: this must be a critical work, rather than a creative work; the creative writing faculty provide the best advice on publishing creative work.)
Additional readings available through course website or library databases

An important note about faculty mentors:  As you work on your essay --- and indeed throughout your graduate career --- it will be important for you to have a faculty mentor in your field whom you can ask for advice and help.  This is important not just in the limited sense that it'll help you improve your paper, but also in the broader sense that building such relationships can significantly help your career.  But as you seek to build such relationships, it is crucial to be aware that faculty members have many demands on their time, demands that have direct and significant effects on their own careers.  Most faculty are genuinely kind and generous people who want to help students --- but they also need to protect the time they have to do research and meet their other professional obligations because those things allow them to keep their jobs.  Therefore it behooves you to respect their time as you build relationships with them.  It is rarely a good idea simply to drop your paper on a faculty member and ask them to read it.  A better approach is to arrange a specific meeting time and arrive with specific, focused questions about particular elements of your essay.  This will pay off in the short term because it makes it more likely that you'll actually get the help you're seeking, and it'll pay off in the long term because behaving professionally with your faculty members will help create the foundation for a better relationship.

Schedule (subject to change)