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Flourish:
An Electronic Newsletter for Scholarly Writers
June
2006
vol.
2, no. 6
This week I came
across a terrific book called The
Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002).
In a fascinating mix of personal anecdote and scholarly
research, the Sri Lankan professor of literature and composition
A.
Suresh Canagarajah describes the challenges facing
scholars from the periphery in getting their work into mainstream
journals in the United States and Europe. It is not a book
of “complaint” he says, but a book about how knowledge gets
produced and who gets to produce it. It's the best thing
I have read about Euroamerican academic writing conventions.
As
one of his first examples, Canagarajah details his own process
of getting an article published in a U.S. journal. The sheer
number of economic constraints he labored under will be
familiar to my non-Euroamerican Flourish readers.
Canagarajah had to leave his first draft behind when fleeing
his war-torn village and later had to purchase paper on
the black market to type it up. American editors informed
him that he must submit the essay on white paper in print
from a laser printer, both impossibilities. In fact, he
had earlier debated handwriting his submission since it
was clearer than the ancient departmental typewriter's ink.
The
deeper obstacles, however, were differences in discourse,
argument, and intellectual style between Sri Lankan academics
and American ones. Canagarajah reproduces his first U.S.
readers' reports, deconstructing their perspectives on his
work. He is not hostile to them, he just shows how radically
their opinions differ from his own intellectual tradition.
At the time, he agreed to most of the reviewers' suggestions
and revised the article according to the standard Euroamerican
academic writing conventions, drastically reducing the personal
commentary and political statements. It then got published.
The
story does not end there, however. The published article
then circulated among his colleagues at his Sri Lankan university.
They thought the article was anemic, boring, and arrogant,
pointing in particular to the passages that he had added
or changed for the Euroamerican reviewers. Canagarajah then
addresses why his colleagues perceived the article as poorly
written and describes Sri Lankan academic culture.
This
is a beautifully written book about the interaction of periphery
and center discourse in the global marketplace of ideas.
I highly recommend it. Canagarajah has written a number
of other interesting
books as well and he is now teaching in the City University
of New York system at Baruch College.
Readers
Write In
A Flourish
reader responded to the May
newsletter's topic of deadlines:
So, I have been
thinking about writing in, and the Samuel Johnson stuff
last month really hit home. I have had a number of invitations
to submit book chapters and special issue articles and
have found just what Johnson did: the deadlines help me
actually write. For awhile now, I have had the goal of
publishing one or two pieces per year in such venues.
Given my work in clinical faculty lines and/or teaching
universities, this level of production is actually pretty
good. The deadlines and the sense that someone is waiting
for my piece in order to pull together the book or special
issue have made the writing process feel more social and
less isolated. Often, these venues have some form of in-house
editing so the editor or others involved give feedback
on drafts. I find this especially helpful when my position
is not "research focused." In the end, I will always remember
your quote, when I took your course, about how few U.S.
university faculty spend more than four hours per week
on reading, writing, and/or research. It's kind of like
investing money: little bit, by little bit, it adds up.
I hope my few hours here and there add up over time to
a body of work.
Linda
McPhee , who holds academic writing workshops for those
in the sciences in Europe , wrote in about the April
newsletter's topic of rejection:
Authors also need to know how to tell a
real rejection from a request to revise. If a journal editor
writes that a paper has been rejected but they would consider
a revised version as a new piece, they do want to see it
again. From years in an editorial office I can say that
such revision requests were not an effort to let the author
down lightly -- we really were asking for a revision. So,
if you get a rejection letter very soon after submitting
the article and with no suggestions for improvement, that
is a straight rejection. If you got a rejection letter but
it took a long time, this means there was some serious consideration,
possibly including outside referees. It's probably a good
idea to go over the paper with others, or present it at
a seminar or conference for feedback, thoroughly revise
and submit to a different journal. If you get a rejection
letter with a suggestion to try another journal, do it!
Author's failure to match the treatment of a subject with
the journal's audience is one of the most common reasons
for rejection. It is not just their way of saying that the
article is too thin. If you get a rejection letter, but
the editors ask you to revise and resubmit it "as a new
piece," do it if you can, and tell them if you aren't willing.
If you get an acceptance letter, but the editors ask you
to make some changes based on the referee comments, you
don't have to do all of them, but make sure your reasons
for not doing any are clear. If you get an acceptance letter
with no request for changes, this is very rare, the smallest
category of response letters, so congratulations!
WALTHAM,
MA—A courageous young notebook computer committed a fatal,
self-inflicted execution error late Sunday night, selflessly
giving its own life so that professors, academic advisors,
classmates, and even future generations of college students
would never have to read Jill Samoskevich's 227-page master's
thesis, sources close to the Brandeis University English
graduate student reported Monday.
The
brave laptop, even after fulfilling its mission, steadfastly
resists a technician's data-recovery attempts.
"This
fearless little machine saved me from unspoken hours of
exasperated head-scratching and eyestrain, as well as
years of agonizing self-doubt over my decision to devote
my life to teaching," said professor John Rebson, who
had already read through three drafts of Samoskevich's
sprawling, 38,000-word dissertation, titled A Hermeneutical
Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos
Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian
Appalachia.
To read the rest
(and you definitely want to read the rest, especially the
punch line), please go to The
Onion (May 17, 2006, issue).
News
from the Editor
In gearing up
for my annual teaching with the UCLA summer program for
graduate students, I have been working once again on revising
my writing workbook. I usually set it aside during the academic
year but return to it over the summer, starting in May.
I have been getting lots of emails about it and reports
of previous versions circulating as photocopies (against
copyright rules I might add!) so I am trying to really push
through it this summer.
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