Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks

It's been, probably, billions of seconds since my last past.  More than a month of seconds.  So today, this morning (in Korea), before I put it off one more day, I want to tell you about what I'm doing.

First of all, I'm carefully reading:

Title: Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success
Author: Wendy Laura Belcher
Kindle Edition
For information straight from the author, click here.

For a long time I have felt like scholarly writing is a genre (or genres) that I was never taught.  Any genre has a formula, process, method, fashion, and so on.  If one can follow instructions to produce a science fiction novel or a screenplay (good or bad) shouldn't the 'steps' and 'pointers' of writing a journal article be just as available?

In Professor Belcher's book, I have found my answer. If you have a journal article, raw data, a seminar paper, whatever--if you take sufficient time you can turn that into a publishable article by attending to the process, method, and so on, that produce works of this genre.  The best part of this book is that Professor Belcher calmly and cooly suggests how this can be accomplished in basically less than an hour a day.

Charles Chesnutt

Tasks are assigned to specific days of specific weeks, thus making a mammoth task much more bite-sized.  So,  as part of a week 2 task (that I am getting to a bit tardy in Day 1 of Week 3), I'm posting my abstract.  Hopefully one of my readers will comment are email me with some feedback.

The article is about Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition.  


ABSTRACT

Ever since William Dean Howells’ review, the key question concerning Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition has been what the author hoped to and did or did not accomplish with this remarkable novel.  My reading of the book responds to this question with Chesnutt’s own oft-repeated claims that the book was aimed at creating Northern sympathy toward the plight of African-Americans in the South.  To understand the attempt at sympathy, we must attend to Lee Ellis, who I claim is the central character of the novel.  Ellis neglects to follow his observations and his conscience to actively oppose the racism corrupting Wilmington.  As the course of the narrative clearly shows, had Ellis acted different, the race riot in the town of Wilmington may have been avoided.  Chesnutt presents Ellis to white, Northern, ‘non-racist’ readers as a lesson in the consequences of their own neglect of the post-bellum situation in the South.  Ironically, Ellis has been all but ignored—mentioned in passing or wholly neglected by most major scholarly engagements with the novel.  Such neglect risks repeating that of Ellis and effectively failing the social challenge of Chenutt’s novel: to see how the passivity of those who attempt, like Ellis, to stay out of a Southern problem is a racism of its own, an active component of the same racism that violently tears at the American social fabric and all it could be.     

Again, comments are welcomed and your readership is much appreciated!