by Juan Zhong

A new series of professionalisation colloquia has been launched this year. For each, a member of the School or a visiting scholar will be invited to give a talk on professionalisation skills for postgraduate students. The first talk was given by Dr. Brian King, a critical sociolinguist from the School, who has a number of publications with leading presses and journals, including Routledge, Language in Society, and the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

Publishing academic articles is a major concern for many postgraduate students, especially given the increased pressure for research outputs in today’s more competitive job market. In light of this new demand, at the beginning of the first semester 2019-2020, Dr. Brian King was invited to give a colloquium to advise postgraduate students on preparing and publishing academic articles.

In the colloquium, Brian kindly shared his experience of academic publishing both during his time as a student and his subsequent academic career. To begin with, he introduced several “Must Knows” before submitting to a certain journal, including targeting a particular journal and being aware of its guidelines for submission. He then explained how a submitted article is processed, detailing the combined work of editors and reviewers, and considered the challenge of handling, and navigating between, different peer reviewers’ comments.

As to writing, Brian vividly differentiated the writing styles of a thesis and a journal article: while the thesis is self-contained academic assessment, an article is a different genre with its own set of conventions. He also made a clear distinction between writing a book chapter and an article, and explained why the writing style should be adjusted according to the specific type of journal you are submitting to, reflecting on his own experience as a sociolinguist of submitting his article to An International Journal for Critical Geographies.

A special challenge of the journal article is the length of time required to develop and hone it. Addressing this, Brian emphasised finding ways of dissociating oneself from the text, as creating “distance” invariably helps in spotting sites for further improvements. Brian also highlighted the importance of positioning the article for submission within an existing tradition and in long-standing “dialogues” within an academic circle, and he suggested that attending conferences can be beneficial for building up a network of peers. Brian encouraged postgraduate students to get some publications, which in his words are evidence of “ambition, readiness, and experience”. Meanwhile, he also pointed out the importance of balancing priorities during academic study.

The colloquium also covered many details concerning publication, such as the “double-edged swords” of getting published as sole author and co-author, strategies on writing explanatory sheets, and impact factors, etc. The colloquium included a Q&A, and the participating postgraduates discussed their concerns, sharing their personal observations as well as their experiences on this topic. Second year PhD student Gloria mentioned her experience of co-authoring a paper for publication; third year PhD student Scott talked about his experience with a revise and resubmit request; third year PhD student Sean shared his experience of his several publications.

All the participants considered the colloquium very insightful and helpful, while anticipating more colloquia on improving professionalisation skills to come in the near future.

Published on: October 11, 2019 < Back >