Student Column: "Dynamics of Academic Writing: How to Plan and Write a Good Journal Article"
Writing in any sense is a difficult task. Good writing requires time, effort, and a clear goal. Since the main goal of academic writing is to share new, innovative ideas with other members of the field by publishing, this month's student column is devoted to aiding communication scholars by discussing an important topic: "Dynamics of Academic Writing: How to Plan and Write a Good Journal Article."
Planning Your Article
In an article on "Writing the Empirical Journal Article," Bem (2003) emphasizes the importance of planning your article before you actually write for publication. He argues (and I agree) that as a social scientist, it is essential for you to think about 'how' and 'for whom' you should write your article at the planning stage: Accuracy and clarity are the primary virtues of good scientific writing, and good writing is good teaching. Without pondering, oftentimes, you end up spending too much time explaining unnecessary theories and listing every single result you have found with too many technical details. Or you may spend too much time making sure your article sounds interesting and written with style, ignoring the fact that these are subsidiary virtues and only matter when achieved with accuracy and clarity.
Accuracy and clarity in academic writing can be accomplished by having good organization and by writing in simple and direct terms. Bem (2003) explains that "good organization not only permits readers to review the article from beginning to end, as they would any coherent narrative, but also to scan it for a quick overview of the study or to locate specific information easily by turning directly to the relevant section" (p. 3). As for simple, direct writing, he continues, "A good journal article tells a straightforward tale of a circumscribed problem in search of a solution. It is not a novel with subplots, flashbacks, and literary allusions, but a short story with a single linear narrative line" (p.3).
In terms of knowing your audiences, most scholars tend to aim for specialized audiences who have a common background of substantial knowledge and methodological expertise. Although they are typical audiences for scientific journals, if you wish to write well, you should aim for broader and wider audiences. In other words, if you can make any intelligent layperson with no expertise in social scientific methods or statistics -- or even your grandmother-- understand the main points and unique contributions of your article, you have succeeded to write a good journal article. Again, good writing is good teaching with coherent narrative.
Writing Your Article
Now, it is time to 'write' your article. To write a good journal article, Bem (2003) suggests visualizing the format of your article as the shape of an hourglass. That is, the article starts with general statements, narrow down to the specifics of your study findings and contributions, and then broadens out again to more general conclusions and considerations.
In general, an academic article is comprised with introduction, literature review, methods, results, and discussion sections and each section serves different functions.
In the introduction, you introduce the background of your study and the nature of the problems being investigated. Be careful not to use technical jargons or specific theories at this stage since readers may not be fully prepared to digest such information. Take enough time and space to inform the readers about your study by having an open statement that contains general information about people or the society or offering examples to illustrate unfamiliar concepts (Bem, 2003).
In the literature review, you summarize the current state of knowledge in the area of investigation. For instance, what previous research has been done on the problem? What are the relevant theories of the phenomenon (Bem, 2003)? Are there any conflicting views on the topic in previous work? After discussing these details, propose research questions or hypotheses of your own study and end your literature review with a brief overview of your study (e.g., unique contributions of your study to the area of investigation) to make a smooth transition into the method section.
In the Methods section, it is important for you to lead readers through the sequence of the methodology used as if he or she were a participant. For example, give the usual overview of the study, including the description of participants, setting, and variables assessed, but then describe the method (e.g., experiment) from the participant's vantage point. Then, offer summaries of what was actually said and done to the study participant. Show question items from surveys, copies of stimulus materials, or pictures of apparatus. The purpose of the methods section is to give your readers a feel for what it was like to be a participant to understand the study design and procedures (Bem, 2003).
In the Results section, a good way of reporting your findings is to give readers the forest first and then the trees. Also, remind readers of the conceptual hypothesis or research questions that you are asking: For instance, "Are men are more emotionally expressive than women?" Provide answers to these questions in following sentences in narrative terms first and then speak to the readers in numbers: "The answer to Hypothesis 1 is yes. The men in all four conditions produced an average of 1.4 cc more tears than the women, F (1,112) = 5.79, p < .025." Now you want to elaborate or qualify the overall conclusion if necessary: "Only in the father-watching condition did the men fail to produce more tears than the women, but a specific test of this effect failed to reach statistical significance, t =1.58, p < .12." By announcing each result clearly in narrative terms before going into specific numbers and statistics, you permit the readers to decide how much detail they want to pursue or to skip ahead to the next main point whenever desirable (Bem, 2003, p. 9). The methods and results sections of an academic article are the neck of the hourglass format as you offer the most specific information about your study.
Lastly, the discussion section includes intellectual discussions of what you have found and therefore, what you have learned from the study in a broad sense. First summarize your findings with clear statements on the support or non-support of the hypotheses or research questions you wanted to investigate throughout the study. Be careful not to simply repeat points already summarized in the results section. Instead, each statement should contribute something new to the reader's understanding of the problem presented and explored. It is also appropriate at this point to compare your results with those reported by other investigators and to discuss contributions and limitations of your study (Bem, 2003). A good discussion section ends with considerations of questions that remain unanswered or that have been raised by the study itself, along with broad general suggestions for the kinds of future research that would help to answer them, following the hourglass shape of an article format.
References
Bem, D. (2003). Writing the empirical journal article. In Darley, J. M., Zanna, M. P., & Roediger III, H. L. (Eds). The compleat academic: A practical guide for the beginning social scientist (2nd Ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
