Wendy Laura Belcher

This book’s intended audience encompasses graduate students who are first learning to write and publish papers. It starts with the scenario in which a graduate student wrote a work for a class and needs to revise it for publication in an academic journal. It walks through a twelve-week process to spruce it up for publication. Its approach leans heavily towards the humanities and social sciences, but it attempts to address those of us in the sciences and other quantitative fields as well. Author Wendy Laura Belcher, literature professor at Princeton University, seems to teach lessons she conveys to her graduate students. She does an excellent job in communicating high-quality insights for a large readership.

I, however, do not fit her mold as an ideal reader. I have self-trained in my academic field after leaving medical school because of a disability. Although not aspiring to faculty status, I want to publish the results of my technological work. I appreciate the benefit of learning from someone in the humanities because prior experience has taught me that they possess a deeper understanding of human perspectives. The process of publication in any field has human hands all over it. Some of what she wrote frankly doesn’t work for the sciences, especially in my field of biomedical informatics. Fortunately, she explicitly recognizes this, too, in the book.

In a short appendix, She addresses those who are starting an academic work from scratch. Another appendix explores how to revise an article after it comes back from peer review, a time fraught with emotion. Reading this book cover-to-cover, I did not follow the author’s advice to practice its writing procedures while I read. I did so because I already have a good discipline of writing and rather need to understand the larger view of how to accomplish this. Her task-analysis helped me see how I need to organize myself over coming weeks. She also helped me fight through some of the inevitable emotions that will come my way. For that, I am grateful. Now, it’s off to polish my looming work before submission…… (más)