The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing

Citation

Grenier, R.S. (2012), "The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing", European Journal of Training and Development, Vol. 36 No. 2/3, pp. 374-376. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090591211204805

Book synopsis

Today, there are numerous handbooks on the market that claim to serve as the authoritative quick reference for a field of study or discipline. Often such books are a collection of current trends and popular concepts that are rarely cohesive in their message, writing style, or quality. In contrast, The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publication provides graduate students, academics, and scholarly practitioners with a well‐structured reference to organizing, writing, and publishing in multiple contexts. The editors describe the text as “intended to enable emerging scholars and anyone else wishing to improve their writing skills to better understand the parts of a manuscript and how they fit together and support each other to create a quality publication” (p. xiii). To meet this end, Rocco and Hatcher bring together a mix of authors that offer advice grounded in research, professional expertise, and their own mistakes and successes. Chapters by former and current editors of AHRD journals are mingled with chapters by faculty in the US and abroad in adult education, human resource development, and business, along with perspectives from graduate students to create a text that is useful for those teaching scholarly writing, and social science researchers and practitioners new to writing for publication.

The book is divided into four parts. The first focuses on skills and ideas foundational to the writing process including: reasons to write, learning to write and helping others to write, useful tips for writers, and identifying writing opportunities. The next section addresses writing techniques that include finding voice, being concise, common writing errors, and how to construct problem and purpose statements. The third section explores the preparation of a manuscript and includes chapters on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, and incorporates information on writing reports, reviews, essays, and other non‐edited works. The final section examines some others areas of the writing process such as being a reviewer, handling feedback, coauthoring, and mentoring novice writers.

The text as a whole does not need to be read from beginning to end. Instead, a reader can skip around, mark valuable content, and make their own way through the chapters without getting confused or lost. The chapters, regardless of authorship, are readable and incorporate quick and meaningful subheadings for easy reference. This is true in Chapter 17, Why Writers Should Also be Reviewers. The chapter is broken into five lessons for writers‐as‐reviewers and ends with a response to the question, how does one become a reviewer?

Moreover, many of the authors include illustrations, tables, and graphics in their chapters to further demonstrate concepts. For example, Chapter 3, Learning to Write, provides a screen image of Endnote software for organizing literature, an example of a high‐level outline, and a representation of a mind map for brainstorming prior to writing. The book concludes with an exceptionally informative chapter of resources for scholarly writing. With headings such as: Reasons for Writing for Publication, Dealing with Pressures, Choosing the Journal, and the Experience of Teaching to Write for Publication, the authors offer recent and applicable references that provide more perspectives and research in the area of writing and publication. This chapter may be particularly useful to journal editors seeking to offer further reading and guidance to novice writers.

Evaluation

As I read this book I found myself dog‐earing pages, making notes in the margins to pass along to students, and sharing excerpts with a colleague who teaches a PhD proposal development course. The true value of the handbook is as a resource for graduate students and newly minted PhD's and EdD's. Even still, scholarly practitioners may find it beneficially as they learn to maneuver and succeed in publishing their own research, or serve as a reviewer for their professional journals.

Many “how‐to write” advice books fail to acknowledge that scholarly writing can only be “understood as a discursive social practice embedded in a tangle of cultural, historical practices that are both institutional and disciplinary” (Kamler and Thomson, 2008, p. 508). Although The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing is not terribly novel in its overall content, it does attend to much of the unspoken work of scholarly writing. The authors acknowledge the intricacies of the writing and publishing process, as well as the nature of self‐as‐writer, social pressures, and accepted standards of practice.

The shortcoming of this text would be the limited number of non‐Western perspectives. With the complexity of advising international students, or as classrooms become increasingly more diverse, and journals with the aid of the Internet publish in multi‐language platforms, handbooks such as this need to not only acknowledge, but also strive to present disparate perspectives. Although there is a chapter dedicated to international and cross cultural issues, all but one of the chapter authors are from North America, Australia, or Western Europe – giving the handbook a culturally lopsided view of scholarly writing and publishing.

Rose and McClafferty (2001) note that faculty rarely discuss what can be done to aid students in becoming more effective writers, yet the expectations associated with scholarly writing are immense. The process of writing in academia is rarely transparent. It is relegated to private meetings and conversations between an attentive graduate advisor and student, discovered while commiserating with fellow writers, or passed from the seasoned journal editor to the newly promoted associate editor over coffee. Rocco and Hatcher bring the heuristics of scholarly writing out from behind closed doors, and with the words of their chapter authors include a range of perspectives that, although from a largely North American perspective, provide a guide to those wishing to begin a writing agenda, improve writing practices, or support novice writers.

In the author's own words

Theoretical and empirical manuscripts are increasingly necessary to support the development of the extant body of knowledge. Helping graduate students and junior faculty develop an understanding of the writing for publication mandates – whether transforming a dissertation into a published article or a book or writing up other research from scratch – and the skills to be successfully involved in the process is an increasing necessity. Without such efforts, writing will never be more than perish avoidance for the largest percentage of faculty and a nonentity for graduate students … Practitioners also need to develop an understanding of the process and be supportive of it. Professional practice depends on a solid research foundation (pp. 86‐87).

About the reviewer

Dr Grenier received her PhD in Adult Education and Certificate of Qualitative Inquiry from the University of Georgia. Her primary areas of research involve cultural institutions as sources of adult learning, expertise development, and qualitative inquiry. Prior to becoming a professor, she worked as a high school English teacher and a training and educational consultant for school districts and non‐profit organizations. Robin S. Grenier can be contacted at: robin.grenier@uconn.edu