Writing for Publications Seminar:

Graduate Students and Professionalization

The Department of English at Texas A&M University

This course is designed to explore professional training and the pedagogy of research. The course straddles these two areas by offering a practicum in scholarly publication for advanced graduate students and focusing on larger questions about how we determine what a "publishable article" is in general and with reference to particular (sub) fields and, even more generally, what professional standards govern writing, editing, and reading articles for journals.

Vision

This course was originally conceived as a way to professionalize graduate students and prepare them for future careers in academia. The ideal audience for the seminar is students who have finished their coursework and are reading for their preliminary exams, and/or students whose dissertations are nearing completion. The concrete goal of the seminar is to enable students to publish their work, but two larger goals include teaching students to be better readers of their own work, and helping students to define and conceptualize their primary field.

Erin Hollis, Ph.D. Candidate

On the Writing for Publications Seminar

"The class helped with my professional development as I learned the process and intricacies of how to get an article published. Receiving reader\'s reports from faculty and a peer helped me to see the weak points in my potential article. The class also helped provide a community of sorts as the students shared their ideas and concerns about getting an article published and going through the job search process. I believe this was a valuable component of the Doctoral program, although it might have been more beneficial earlier in the program."

Seminar Highlight

Writing for Publications Syllabus

Professional Training

To help students determine the difference between a seminar paper, a dissertation chapter, and an article, faculty members, journal editors, and guest speakers attended class and discussed their experiences in the publication process. Students were also required to write and respond to readers' reports on their papers, which helped them to learn how to evaluate articles regardless of field.

Website by Amy Montz

Considerations for Future Restructuring of Course

The course raised a number of questions for the future about the timing of professional training. Should a discussion of professionalization happen earlier in the doctoral program? When do students most benefit from exposure to professional academic life?

Sally Robinson, Graduate Director

On the Writing for Publication Seminar

"Facilitating the seminar on Writing for Publication taught me that students would benefit from more sustained attention to the question of what differentiates an article from a seminar paper and from a dissertation chapter. We spent quite a lot of time thinking about this question in the abstract and then bringing it to bear on each student\'s article-in-progress. I also learned that we need to have some formal or informal mechanism in place to encourage students to form writing groups, especially at the dissertation stage. The students learned quite a lot, I think, from writing readers\' reports, decoding readers\' reports, and responding to them."

Immediate and Far-Reaching Goals

One of the future goals of this seminar is that dissertating students will establish communities and writing groups that will help them complete their degrees. These writing communities are ideally trusted critical sources that will offer further insight on a student\'s work.