Writing for publication in journals:
things I wish I’d known before I got started
Nigel Harwood
[email protected]
What questions do you have?
Either individually or with someone else, please make a
list of questions and issues that you wish to address
in today’s session
Hopefully these questions/issues will be answered/covered
as we go along
We can talk about anything which hasn’t been dealt with at
the end of the session, when there’ll be an opportunity
for extended discussion
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So what should I warn you about?

The chances are you’ll get some kind of rejection the 1st
time you submit

In fact, you’ll probably get some sort of rejection even
when you’re an experienced writer and you’ve published
a number of articles!

However, a rejection might not be a rejection. You often
get invited by the journal editor to make changes to your
manuscript and resubmit it

You need to be patient because it takes so long to get
the reviewers’ comments on your paper (two-three
months at the minimum. Four or five months is about
average—and seven or eight months isn’t uncommon!)
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What else should I warn you about?

Many reviewers are very courteous and helpful…

You may get comments which you believe to be unfair

You’ll need to draft and redraft, and write lots of different
versions of your article

You may have to write two or even three revised
versions of your article before it’s finally accepted

The whole process of sending the 1st version of your
article to the journal and seeing it appear in print may
take two or three years (I had an article accepted in
October 2010 but was told it won’t appear until
September 2012!!)
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Don’t give up yet!
So far it’s been all bad news—but don’t give up yet…
People who’ve never published before often have a
number of mistaken ideas about publishing. Once
these are cleared up, things aren’t as bad as you
might have thought they were
Let’s look at some of these common misconceptions,
and correct them…
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Common misconceptions
Misconception
 ‘Everyone else writes better than me—look how
beautifully written the articles in this journal are’
Response
 No wonder they’re beautifully written—they’ve been
redrafted and rewritten so many times! McKay (2003),
a very experienced researcher and former editor of
TESOL Quarterly, begins an article on writing for
publication by saying ‘This is my 23rd draft’! (p.91) For
an article to go through 23 drafts is unusual—but
expect it to go through four or five…
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Common misconceptions (2)
Misconception
 ‘If my article is rejected it means my work’s no good’
Response
 It doesn’t necessarily mean this at all. The most prestigious
journals have extremely high rejection rates. McKay (2003)
reports that only about 10% of manuscripts were eventually
published when she was editor of TESOL Quarterly.
 McKay adds, importantly, that ‘almost half of the
submissions were not at all appropriate for the journal to
begin with’ (p.99), and she didn’t even send them out to
reviewers
 So if your article is rejected, it may be because you’re trying
to publish in the wrong journal. Get your supervisor’s help
with choosing the right journal, or an experienced
colleague’s advice…
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Common misconceptions (3)
Misconception
 ‘If my article’s rejected by one journal, that means no journal
will accept it’
Response
 Probably everyone who’s ever published anything has had an
article rejected by one journal but accepted by another journal

This doesn’t mean that if you get a rejection you should
automatically send your article unchanged somewhere else.
You should read the reviewers’ criticisms carefully, perhaps
give your article and the reviewers’ comments to a trusted
colleague for comment, and then decide whether to change
the article and resubmit it to the 1st journal again.
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Common misconceptions (4)
Misconception
 ‘All western journals are equally hard to get published in’
Response
 I wouldn’t agree with this—some journals are harder to
get into than others, and their reviewers and editors are
more demanding
 A common method of trying to get an article published is
to make a shortlist of suitable journals which publish the
kind of article you’ve written, and then to draw up a
‘pecking order’ in terms of prestige…
 You may have no idea about what the pecking order in
your field looks like—but your supervisor will know, so
ask him/her
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Common misconceptions (5)
(Partial) Misconception
 ‘I’m a non-native speaker—so it’ll be even harder for me
to get published than it would be for a native speaker.
Reviewers will see my English isn’t perfect, and will
reject my article because they’re prejudiced’
Response
 I don’t think this is a total misconception: some reviewers
probably are prejudiced. However, I don’t believe you
should be pessimistic if you’re not a native speaker,
because there are things you can do to lessen any
potential prejudice.
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Non-native authors and prestigious
journals

Top quality journals reject the vast majority of
manuscripts submitted for publication:
 several of the editors of mainstream British and north
American physics, chemistry, and biology journals
Gosden (1992) corresponded with put the rejection
rate at over 70%
 Swales (1990) claims that the figure is even higher in
the arts and humanities at 80-95%

This helps to explain why the editors in Gosden's (1992)
study admitted they were, in effect, 'looking for reasons
to reject manuscripts', and that 'linguistic grounds [were]
as good a reason as any for rejection' (p.129).
However, there are things you can do to lessen any
difficulties you may have…
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Non-native writers:
publishing strategies

Journals are beginning to offer a proofreading service to
non-native authors. The journal English for Specific
Purposes, for instance, offers to provide Japanese
authors with ‘a list of people who can check and improve
the English of an article before submission’

Get a native speaker in your field to proofread your
manuscript (If they’re not in your field, they probably
won’t understand the article—and they may make
inappropriate changes)

Consider collaborating with your supervisor/a native
speaker and co-authoring your paper
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Interpreting editors’ cover letters
Take a look at the handout of three examples of
editors’ cover letters
Identify where the editors are giving the author(s)
encouragement! How is this done? What language is
used?
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Mixed messages

‘…with their first experiences of submitting papers to
international journals for publication, students may approach
me with their referees’ reports, explaining that they generally
understood the scientific points of discussion…, but they were
not quite sure what they were being invited to do, often due to
conflicting signals. For example, one of the papers in the
corpus was described as ‘interesting’, ‘carefully studied’, and
‘sound enough’; but then the referee went on to comment that
the basic idea underlying the research could ‘hardly be
understood’. Learning to decipher the lines and inferences
between the lines of referees’ comments…are…skills which
require considerable practice.’ (Gosden 2003: 99)
Again, I suggest your supervisor or someone who’s
experienced at publishing in your field will be the best
person to turn to when trying to interpret these ‘mixed
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messages’…
The publishing process:
from start to finish
On the handout I’ve sketched out what the process of
writing a journal article might look like from your 1st
draft all the way through to publication
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Reviewers’ comments
What criteria do reviewers use when
evaluating manuscripts?
Take a look at the instructions to reviewers
provided by Journal of Pragmatics and
Journal of Second Language Writing
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Responding to reviewers’
comments

Normally editors ask you to carefully record how you’ve
responded to reviewers’ comments. I suggest more
rather than less detail is better here (within reason!); and
that you should go through EACH of the reviewers’
comments in turn in a separate document to the editor.
Here’s an example of how I responded recently to a
reviewer’s comment…
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Responding to reviewers’
comments: an example
Reviewer 2’s Comment:
I found myself wondering, in this section and again later,
why the authors had chosen to focus on the proofreaders
and not the writers themselves (or both).
Authors’ Response:
As the reviewer points out, there are other parties directly
or indirectly involved or affected by proofreading. We point
this out towards the end of our paper, where we discuss
our future research plans which involve these other parties.
However, we have added a footnote to our introductory
section so that the point is made sooner rather than later
that there are other parties involved. We also make clear in
this footnote why we started our research on proofreading
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with the proofreaders.
Writers’ stories
Hopefully this handout of a few stories of writers’
experiences of the publishing process may help
some of the things we’ve discussed so far make
more sense..
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Final words

If I had to give someone who’s new to publishing one
piece of advice, it would be:
Write with someone who has experience of publishing,
or at least have someone like this read your work and
the reviewers’ comments you receive.
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Discussion
Have the questions and issues you noted down at the
start of today’s session been dealt with? If not, let’s
discuss them now…
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References
Gosden H (1992) Research writing and NNSs: from the editors. Journal of
Second Language Writing 1(2): 123-139.
Gosden H (2003) ‘Why not give us the full story?’: functions of referees’
comments in peer reviews of scientific research papers. Journal of English
for Academic Purposes 2(2): 87-101.
Leki I (2003) Tangled webs: complexities of professional writing. In CP
Casanave & S Vandrick (eds.), Writing for Scholarly Publication: Behind the
Scenes in Language Education. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
pp.103-112..
McKay SL (2003) Reflections on being a gatekeeper. In CP Casanave & S
Vandrick (eds.), Writing for Scholarly Publication: Behind the Scenes in
Language Education. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.91-102.
Sasaki M (2003) A scholar on the periphery: standing firm, walking slowly. In
CP Casanave & S Vandrick (eds.), Writing for Scholarly Publication: Behind
the Scenes in Language Education. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, pp.211-21.
Swales JM (1990) Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research
Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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