Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success

"This book is a wonderful addition to a graduate course on professional writing, to a writers' group in need of some structure, or even to the lone writer who needs assistance becoming an academic writer."
—Chronicle of Higher Education

Wendy Laura Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success is a revolutionary approach to enabling academic authors to overcome their anxieties and produce the publications that are essential to succeeding in their fields. Each week, readers learn a particular feature of strong articles and work on revising theirs accordingly. At the end of twelve weeks, they send their article to a journal. This invaluable resource is the only guide that focuses specifically on publishing humanities and social science journal articles.

Key Features

• Has a proven record of helping graduate students and professors get published: This workbook, developed over a decade of teaching scholarly writers in a range of disciplines at UCLA and around the world, has already helped hundreds to publish their articles in peer-reviewed journals.
• Demystifies the academic publishing process: This workbook is based on actual research about faculty productivity and peer review, students' writing triumphs and failures, as well as the author's experiences as a journal editor and award-winning author.
• Proceeds step by manageable step: Within the context of clear deadlines, the workbook provides the instruction, exercises, and structure needed to revise a classroom essay, conference paper, dissertation chapter, master's thesis, or unfinished draft into a journal article and send it to a suitable journal.
• Targets the biggest writing challenges: This workbook focuses squarely on the most difficult tasks facing scholarly writers, such as getting motivated, making an argument, and creating a logical whole.

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks can be used individually or in groups, and is particularly appropriate for graduate student professional development courses, junior faculty orientation workshops, post-doc groups, and journal article writing courses.

Wendy Laura Belcher is assistant professor of African literature at Princeton University in the Department of Comparative Literature and Center for African American Studies. She has taught journal article writing workshops in North America, Europe, and Africa.

Praise for Wendy Belcher and Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks

"A comprehensive, well-written and beautifully organized book on publishing articles in the humanities and social sciences that will help its readers write forward with a first-rate guide as good company."
—Joan Bolker, author of Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day

"Humorous, direct, authentic … a seamless weave of experience, anecdote, and research."
—Kathleen McHugh, professor and director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women

"A useful text that will be an excellent resource for any writer attempting to publish their work."
—Larry Chandler, Graduate Student

"Wendy Belcher's book is revolutionizing the way younger scholars perceive academic publishing and radically transforming their level of access to it (and consequently to the profession). It is by far the most readable or practical guide to academic writing on the market."
—Beth Goodhue, UCLA

"Wendy's guidance has been a tremendous help to me, and the book is great for grad students, junior faculty, or anyone who wants to learn how to write and publish more effectively."
-Jake Dorman, The University of Kansas

"Your book struck such a nerve because there is a long chain of assumptions in academia that scholars should just know how to do certain things. The relief among faculty is palpable when I explain in groups that few of us -- even those who have been published in journals -- were ever taught properly. And although it helps everyone who cracks it, your book is especially a godsend for faculty from other cultures." -Carole Sargent, Georgetown University

"Thanks for your wonderful book!"
-Georgina Green, Graduate Student

"Absolutely LOVE the book!"
-Karra Bikson, Graduate Student

Wendy Laura Belcher is an award-winning author, academic editor, international lecturer, and professor. She designed one of the first publication focused writing courses for graduate students and junior faculty in the nation, and for ten years has conducted such courses at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in research institutions around the world, including those in Norway, Malawi, Sudan, and Egypt. These popular workshops are based on her twenty years of experience as an academic editor, including eleven years managing an ethnic studies press and the peer-reviewed journal of record in the field, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, as well as her two master’s degrees in the social sciences and a doctorate in the humanities.

She is also a published nonfiction author, whose memoir about her childhood in Ethiopia and Ghana, Honey from the Lion: An African Journey, won a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award and honorable mention in the Martha Albrand/PEN Society Award for first book of nonfiction. She is now an assistant professor of African literature in the Princeton University Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for African American Studies.