Myles W. Mason, PhD.

post 4 in the Navigating Academic Publishing series

---

For the fourth post of the series Navigating Academic Publishing, I dip into more of the practical advice of how to begin an academic research project with the explicit goal of crafting a journal article submission. This post covers my personal methods, which are just some of the many ways to accomplish research.

---

A brief history of my publications to date

It is not until the essay I most recently drafted that I’ve started a project “from scratch.” The first four years post-PhD, most of my publications came from pieces of my dissertation or later coursework. It can be overwhelming to start “from scratch,” so don’t. At least, not until you have to. I have a summary of how I moved a seminar paper to publication, and how I worked my dissertation chapters/ideas moved in much of the same way.

The rest of this post focuses on those “from scratch” projects.

---

Origin Points

The goal of grad school—the courses, the seminar papers, the prospectuses, the theses/dissertations—is to equip you with the tools and means to conceive and execute research projects. However, grad school is a version of the job; in other words, what you learn approximates the job of being a scholar, but it’s not the job exactly. You’ve built the foundations, now you have to adapt the structure.

A Blended Approach

As your scholarly persona coheres, there will be a general pocket of artifacts you hang out with as well as an area of literature you’re seeking to intervene upon. This will expedite some of the process of going from a basic idea to a fully realized essay.

For instance, I am usually dealing with the history of 911 via media infrastructures. My artifacts tend to be newspaper articles or federal policies; my literature reviews tend to touch on media infrastructures through scholars like Lisa Parks, Nicole Starosielski and Stephen Graham, which I supplement with COMM/911 scholars like Elizabeth Ellcessor and Annie Hill. More broadly, I’m deploying foundational concepts like Kimberlé Crenshaw‘s intersectionality and/or Armond Towns‘ Black media philosophy. This allows a kind of blend between the two methods that’s a bit more patchwork and more conducive to “playing” within the areas you’ve become most familiar.

But what from there?

---

How I approach the writing

Write to Find the Point/Argument

This is not the most “efficient” way to go about things since it leads to a lot of abandoned words and documents (SAVE EVERYTHING, THOUGH). But I write to find my point. I have untold number of files on my computer titled “[topic] freewrite,” where I just write through ideas. These freewrites can be intrinsic analyses (artifact analysis), extrinsic analyses (contextual overview), or literature reviews. Or it can be none of those things.

“Blank Page Syndrome” is often the biggest thing thwarting writers at any stage of their career. The expanse of blank space in a new document or on a new page can be overwhelming, but if you can build a habit of getting what’s in your brain onto the page, it makes the initial hump of starting a project less of a task.

Sometimes I’ll write a full 6,000 words just to realize I’ll use none of them because it shows me the actual argument I was trying to or wanted to make. But it’s fun! (This is sarcasm. I find it fun, but realize I’m likely alone there.)

Within the freewrites, though, the ideas come through. For my current R&R on 911’s history and the advent of civilian operators, I went through about five different analysis drafts, all with slightly different foci in the same archive. The final version of the argument and analysis that is in the article features snippets from across all those iterations. No one single version alone was the right fit for the project.

A different example: there’s a whole 3,000 words that lives on my computer analyzing Cowboy Carter by Beyoncé (country album), its exigence, and its import to public culture. In that, I try applying rhetorical versions of Newton’s Laws of Motion in different ways. Am I writing about the Laws of Motion anymore? About CC anymore? No, not actively and not in the same ways, but doing that led me to my current project as well as planting seeds for later arguments about CC and whiteness.

Jump Around

The impulse might be to write with through-composition, going from introduction to conclusion straight through. If you’re writing just to build the muscle, that can be a helpful way to jumpstart yourself because you have clear start and end points. Otherwise, if you’re actively working toward a publication, it can be more beneficial to jump around.

What I tend to do is open a templated document and put the title of a section (e.g. introduction), enter a few lines, then insert a page break, put the next section title, and repeat the process for the whole paper. This just aids jumping around and seeing where sections begin/end.

I tend to use a general formula for my introductions where I open articles by overviewing an event—Lizzo’s Tiny Desk Concert, the selling of meme imagery, the events surrounding BBQ Becky, etc. These offer an easy entry point and give the reader needed context. Who, what, when, where, how are all covered in the relaying of events. I tend to reserve “why”s for the analysis, but you could preview it in the introduction as well.

From there, I’ll sometimes jump down to the “Method and Archive” section. Is that what comes next in the finalized essay? No, but I can usually describe the archive for the essay and how I collected the artifacts at this stage of drafting. And sometimes, it’s better to have the archive clearly articulated because it can help narrow your literature review before you dive into it. (Personally, I will procrastinate a literature review as long as possible, they are my least favorite to write along with conclusions.)

Bouncing around the essay as you draft it will ultimately build a more layered and interlaced argument. If you feel like you can only move “forward” through writing an essay, it feels counterintuitive to move from the analysis back to the literature review. However, bouncing around will make it feel more natural to build the sections of the essay alongside one another rather than consecutively.

Write Most Days

The usual advice is write everyday, but that is a scary standard when you’re starting out. (And/or can cause stress flashbacks to finals during coursework or comprehensive exams.) So just try to write most days—at least 4 days a week. But don’t pressure yourself to write articles.

Unless I’m actively working on an article submission, I don’t sit down and think, “Ok, today I’m going to write a literature review/analysis section/introduction for an article.” Rather, I think, “Today, I’m going to write about Beyoncé’s inspiration for Cowboy Carter,“ or “Today, I’ll do a close textual analysis of [this section of an artifact.]”

Alternatively, it can be helpful to write non-academically while building the muscle. If you turn to journaling, creative writing, or other writing-based forms of expression, you are still building the same compositional skills. However, taking the “academic,” “scholarship,” and/or “job” aspect out for the writing can help you feel more confident in putting thoughts to prose. I’ve found that as I’ve focused on non-academic writing, the “stress” of writing an article is different. I’m not worried about the craft and the content because I’m confident in my capacities to write. Thus, the ideas and arguments are what become the focus in a more focused manner. Productive procrastination is also effective and counts (I started writing these posts as a productive procrastination).

In some circles, there’s the idea that you need to write one million words to become an expert or confident writer. When I started my PhD, I tried to track how many words I wrote, but I inadvertently made it a competition. It became a problem of me focused on just adding words to the count rather than meaningfully focusing on what I was writing at the time. More recently, I tried to guesstimate how many words I wrote across grad school:

• In my MA & PhD, I took 22 total courses; of those, 7 courses had 15 page final papers, and the other 15 courses had 20+ page final papers.
• If we say ~250 words per page, we have:
  • non-comm courses: (15*250)*7= 26,250 words
  • comm courses: (20*250)*15= 75,000 words
• I still have my dissertation prospectus, which is 16,120 words. Let’s say half of that for the thesis proposal? 8,000.
• Thesis project: 149 pages *250= 37,250
• Dissertation project: 76,325 words

This places my rough, minimum total words in grad school 574,945 words, 575k to make it round. That’s over halfway to “expertise” per the million-word rule. It doesn’t count all the drafts, all the conference presentations and colloquia, all the prewriting projects, anything beyond just the final papers of courses, comprehensive exams, etc. As PhD Candidates, ABD, and as junior faculty, you’re likely much closer to the 1 million word mark than you think from your graduate studies alone.

Writing most days will help further develop the practice of translating thoughts onto the page. The thoughts are already there; the job is getting them on the page. The more you do that, the easier it is to do.

Write First, Cite Later

Citations, even with citation managers, can really thwart writing momentum. I used to be MILITANT about citing while I was drafting because I “wouldn’t know where it came from” otherwise. What I’ve started to do is just parenthetical notes to Future Me™ that give the needed info, like title and page.

This method will also forefront YOUR voice. I tend to over-cite (with reasons), which can lead to burying my own voice. By writing and then citing, I can still gesture to and think alongside those folks without burying my contributions or hiding behind theirs.

---

A rough order of operations

No two essays come together the same way. However, as you hone the skill, you will begin to develop a general order of operations. This is mine once I’m in the mindset of writing an article rather than the “prewriting” stages before I’ve found the argument.

• Pick the journal and use the template they ask for, if applicable.
• Come up with a working title, complete title page, and generate a 2-sentence abstract.
  • At this stage, the abstract is usually: “This essay offers [idea] to describe [define]. I turn to [artifact] to analyze [some tropes].”
  • If I have an idea of the disciplinary takeaway at this point, I’ll add it as well.
• Write the opening of the introduction.
  • This is what I discuss above; the who? what? when? where? how? of the selected event at the core of the essay.
• Write the thesis and roadmap.
  • At first, both of these are very rough. But it’s helpful to have that placeholder to refer back to and/or edit.
  • I often have theses that look like: “In this essay, I argue [argument] and offer something…” and I update the “something” as the paper coheres.
• Structure out the paper
  • Usually, at this stage, I will just label them “lit review,” “method/archive,” etc., and come up with catchier titles (or not) later.
• Take a stab at the theory/contribution.
  • What’s the one-sentence definition of the contribution? Start there and build it out.
  • For my affective inertia article, this section literally began as, “It’s like regular inertia but for emotions and ideologies.” Then, I expanded from there.
• Craft a “shitty first draft” for the analysis beats/sections.
  • If I’m to the article-writing stage, I know roughly the three things I’ll want to put in the analysis. I do quick set-ups for each like for the contribution.
• As I’m drafting, I will have thoughts of “oh, I need to address x in the conclusion.”
  • Until the article is mostly in place, my conclusions are just a laundry list of little notes, e.g., “mention [related incident] as future inquiry.”
• I’m a fast writer once my ideas have set (I attribute this to writing most/every day/s), so an article draft can come together in as quickly as three weeks…or take as long as several months, just depends.
• Once there is a full draft, I put it away and force myself to focus on something else for at least one day. When I return to it, I re-read and revise it as I’m going along.
  • These first reads can go one of two ways:
    • There are only small changes and so I begin the submission process afterward.
    • There are major changes that prompt a heavy redrafting of the idea.
  • I tend to get “the zoomies” when I feel an essay is submission-worthy and will blast through the submission process. Sometimes this can bite me in the butt, so I’ve been trying to be more tempered lately. Emphasis on trying.

---

The next post will turn to creating “commitments” in your writing that can aid in crafting articles. I’m curious, though, what kind of general steps you take in creating any new projects. Do you immediately dive into the essay draft? Do you do everything with pen and paper? Stickies? Share in the comments!