Pointers on writing and publishing for academics

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Sara Custer: Hello, and welcome to the Times Higher Education podcast. I’m your host, Sara Custer, also the editor of THE Campus. Two of the most beneficial parts of an academic career are also perhaps the most challenging. The autonomy to work on what you want when you want is nice. But setting a good work-life balance between family and friends and the new research you’re doing that’s ideally funded by a grant you’ve brought in is something many academics struggle with. And while being encouraged to share that work with the world is rewarding, it’s also hard graft, especially when the main method of communication with your academic peers is through the written word, ideally in a high-impact journal. Academic publishing was recently described by a friend of mine doing a PhD as getting the keys to the kingdom. So in this episode of the podcast, we’ve asked academics and authors, publishers and postdocs to share with us their advice that we hope will help you unlock the door to that kingdom or even re-unlock it. Because as our contributors will remind you, writing is an exercise of hard work that can always be improved upon. Their advice also covers everything from varying the cadence of your sentences to finding the compelling hook in your work to thinking about bringing in other voices beyond just those writing in standard American or British English. So, we hope you enjoy.

Sara Custer: And if you’d like to read more tips on academic publishing, head to timeshighereducation.com/campus to find our spotlight full of resources offering just that.

John Weldon: Hi, this is John Weldon from Victoria University in Australia. I’m an associate professor here, ostensibly working in writing, communication and content production, but these days I find myself located more in curriculum revitalization and innovation, transitions pedagogy, and the development of the VU Block Model. As an early career academic looking to publish, it’s important you make yourself aware of the zeitgeist in your field. Especially if it’s an emerging, evolving or competitive field of research where boundaries and envelopes are constantly being pushed, it’s important you stay up to date. To do this, you need to start networking. You need to weave yourself into the social and professional fabric of your field. Finding out where your research community hangs out online is a rock-solid way of doing this. Maybe it’s Twitter or Telegram, Discord or some other app or site. You’ll work that out by searching for the leading names in your field and the topics they cover until you find the platform on which they live. Once there, follow the journals, relevant hashtags, and the leading people in your field. Go further and mine these leading people’s follow lists to see who and where they turn to for information. If you do this carefully, curating and editing your follow lists over time, they effectively become tailored news aggregators, dropping the latest goss from your field directly into your inbox each day. You’ll hopefully glean nuances in regard to what’s being talked about before it’s published or presented at conferences. You’ll be aware of the zeitgeist. And you only need to spend 20 minutes or so a day going through this list to stay up to date. One quick aside, try adding a few controversial names to your lists too. Don’t just follow the people you agree with. We all need to be challenged in our thinking, and so it’s important to keep a sense of balance. You don’t want your networks turning into an echo chamber.

John Weldon: The next step is becoming part of the zeitgeist yourself. Successful networking includes leading and sharing as well as following. In this instance, you’ll lead and share by bringing interesting information of your own to the communities you’re now a part of. And that doesn’t just mean sharing your own research. People soon become tired of those who exclusively blow their own trumpets. It means sharing information that the community will find useful. After all, social media is, haha, social. It’s an exchange of conversation and information and support, as is networking. So good luck in your networking exploration. I hope it leads to publishing. And say hi if you stumble across me as you’re trolling through social media. Cheers.

Dorsa Amir: Hi, my name is Dorsa Amir. I am a postdoc in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology. And today I want to talk to you a bit about finding your, what I call, productivity equilibrium. So in academia, I think it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that everyone’s working harder than you. And this kind of leads to this vicious cycle where you constantly feel that you’re not working hard enough, that others are working harder than you. And so you push yourself a little bit too much to try and catch up. You inevitably burn out. And maybe you actually end up being less productive, thus validating your belief that you are in fact falling behind. This is a pretty vicious cycle, and I think it’s a recipe for disaster. And so we need to think a little bit more critically about our expectations for our own productivity and what is actually sustainable. And I think one key insight is figuring out the difference between short-term and long-term productivity. Short-term productivity is like you have a deadline coming up, so you just kind of all hands on deck, you cancel social events, you work on weekends, you work on holidays because you really want to meet this deadline. And maybe in some emergency situations, that’s necessary, but that is just not a sustainable strategy in the long term. You are going to burn out. It is just not possible to devote all your resources to work and constantly feel as if you’re not doing enough. You’re going to be miserable. And I think that one thing we really should do is think a little bit harder about our own expectations of ourselves. When do we expect ourselves to work? And how much do we work within that time? And this is what I call the productivity equilibrium. What is the amount of productivity that’s actually sustainable in the long term? And I’m just going to give you a hint now: the equilibrium is not at 100%. That’s just a mistaken belief. If you expect yourself to work at all points in time when every moment is fair game and you expect yourself to potentially be working, well, you’re always going to feel as if you’re falling behind because you’re not going to be working 100% of the time. And that’s just a mistaken belief to begin with. I found a number that works for me. It’s not 100%. There are definitely points during the week that I could be working, but I choose not to. I take a break for lunch, I make time to see my friends, I read novels, I don’t push myself too hard on the weekends and evenings. And maybe I’m not being as maximally productive as I can be, but I am optimizing, not maximizing, because there are other components to me that are just as important and that need investment and energy. So I encourage you to think a little bit about finding a strategy that works for you in the long term and really trying to be a little bit kinder with yourself about your own expectations of work.

Tara Brabazon: Hello, I’m Tara Brabazon, and I’m the professor of cultural studies at Flinders University in Australia. I’m currently living in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and I’ve worked around the world. So I’ve published 20 books, over 250 refereed articles, and hundreds of articles of journalism. So let me offer you my best suggestion to enable you to write that PhD, write that article, write that book. And I focused my suggestion around the mantra: pick your rabbit. No one can reach a goal in writing, or indeed in life, if we can’t name that goal. No one can be successful if we don’t actually know what success looks like. The act of naming your writing to come will allow you to understand something of what your vision of success may be. Then, when you’ve got that goal named with clarity, you’ve got a chance of reaching it. This seems a very simple tip, but it’s actually quite challenging because, you know, life is tough to work out what success means. We flick through Instagram and applying magnetic eyelashes seems a key life skill at the moment. A powerful secondary skill seems to be understanding the subtleties of a contour brush. At different moments of our life, the definition of success transforms. And these determinations of a precise goal of success matter because they impact enormously on how we research, how we write, and how we publish. When I become lost in magnetic lashes and contouring powder, I ask myself one question, and it always focuses me. What would you like people to say at your eulogy? Ask yourself at the end of your life, what is the achievement? What would you like people to say about you? And that’s an important question and do try and answer it, but then you’ve got to ask yourself a really tough follow-up question. Am I today enacting the behaviour that’s going to create that outcome? In other words, is there any connection between what you are doing today and what you hope you’ll be remembered for at the end of your life? Now, if there’s no connection between your behaviour today and your desired outcome, or indeed your behaviour is antithetical to that desired outcome, then it may be time to make a change. If you want to be known as a great writer or an influential researcher and you’re drinking a black sambuca for breakfast or a bit too fixated on those TikTok dancers, then it is time to realize the gulf between your behaviour and your goals.

Tara Brabazon: Now, luckily, I learned this lesson very early. My parents had me quite late in their lives. They were country people born and raised in rural Western Australia. And Kevin Brabazon, my now 94-year-old father, always used to tell me when I was growing up that if you chased two rabbits, you wouldn’t catch either of them. So pick your rabbit. And if you pick your rabbit, you have a fighting chance of catching it. So when you pick your rabbit, you also change your attitude to failure. It is a myth that writers are supposedly special people and can catch all the rabbits. Writing is not about being special, it’s about behavior, it’s about hard graft. But if successful writers do have a characteristic, I think it is their attitude to failure. Great writers treat failure as a learning opportunity, a chance to get better. Failure becomes the foundation for improvement. So if you’re frightened of criticism, you will be too frightened to write. I think it was Ray Bradbury who said, “You only fail if you stop writing,” end of quote. So have the courage to be different. If writing was easy, if a PhD was easy, everybody would do it. But the point is, only a very small slice of the population ever starts, let alone finishes a PhD. So you have to recognize on a daily basis that you are doing something spectacular. Every day you need to remember that you’re doing something that 99% of the population are not doing. You have made a decision to not fit in. You have made a decision to stretch. So claim that difference and relish in the power of being extraordinary.

Tara Brabazon: Schedule an appointment with your writing so that you pick your rabbit. The characteristic of universities is on a daily basis we confuse the urgent and the important. Pick your rabbit. So therefore you need to schedule writing. Make an appointment with your writing. You wouldn’t let your partner down. You wouldn’t let your friends down. Why are you letting yourself down? Make an appointment with your writing. And look, let’s be honest, life is terrible most of the time. It’s changeable. It’s filled with pain, angst, confusion and fear. So how do we create any sense of order from this disorder? Well, we schedule a time, we pick a task, and we complete that task. So do it now because your now is powerful. You find that rabbit now, and you follow it.

Daniel Martin: Hello, writers. My name is Daniel Martin, and I’m a publisher of academic journals at Elsevier. I’m also a fiction author, fiction publisher and occasionally I teach creative writing workshops at Delft University here in Holland. Today, I’m going to talk with you about writer’s block. Writer’s block is a condition in which a writer has trouble accessing and articulating their ideas into written words. What I want to share with you today is what I call the Jack London method. This method of writing can be used to help prevent writer’s block by establishing the type of goals that help you to form strong writing habits. In the office of his massive farm in Northern California, Jack London had three distinct desks. One desk was for farm business, one was for personal correspondence, and the other desk was for writing fiction. Legend has it that Jack London would sit down at the fiction desk first thing every morning and write a minimum of 1,000 words. This habit was essential for him to have created such a large volume of work throughout his career. I can imagine that for many, the idea of writing a thousand words a day can seem incredibly daunting at first. So it’s probably best to start with an obtainable goal and work your way up to more content production as you further develop your habit. Theoretically, well-developed writing habits should be relatively transferable between academic, non-fictional and fictional writing. While you work to establish strong writing habits that can help to prevent you from getting writer’s block in the first place, remember that, as in life, so with writing. Don’t let a fear of making mistakes hold you back. Get the words out first, edit them for clarity, word choice, grammar and punctuation later. In fact, deleting words, sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages on occasion can vastly improve your writing. Even the greatest writers, with all their amazing abilities and habits, do not create polished writing in their first drafts. However, that first draft and getting over the initial fear of imperfection is an essential first step to eventually arriving at a polished final draft that is suitable for submission and eventual publication.

Joe Moran: Hello, my name is Joe Moran. I’m professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University. I wrote a book called First You Write a Sentence a few years ago. I’m very interested in writing and making writing more elegant and inviting. I’ve got two bits of advice really. The first one is about writing journal articles. The second one is about writing sentences. Writing journal articles, I think I would say that the big flaw with quite a lot of journal articles that I’ve written and have been rejected or that are sent to me as a reviewer is that they’re often about more than one thing. It’s quite important to make your article about one thing that you can explain perhaps in one or two sentences. The reason this is often a problem is because most journal articles are part of a larger project, whether it’s someone’s PhD or perhaps part of a monograph that they’re writing. It’s very rare for people to just say, oh, I want to write a journal article about this topic and then do it and then go on to something else. So quite often journal articles are trying to do too many things. What they often are is just two or three articles and they haven’t kind of separated those things out in their head.

Joe Moran: The second piece of advice is about writing sentences, and it’s just really to vary the length of your sentences. It’s quite common in academic writing to have uniformly quite long sentences of 40 words or more. And it took me a long time to understand this, but you can write those kind of sentences and they can be perfectly clear and logical and rational and grammatical, and yet they can also be quite uninviting and quite effortful for the reader because every long sentence is a burden on the reader’s short-term memory. They have to get to the end of the sentence before they can unpack it all. And that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write long sentences because you do need to have long sentences sometimes, but it does mean that it’s quite good to vary the length of your sentences. Short sentences work particularly well at the start and ends of paragraphs or the start and ends of sections where you can just sort of nudge the reader along a little bit with your argument or you can bring them in with a soft landing towards the end. And short and long sentences also do slightly different things. Long sentences are about complexity, about stretching an idea out. Short sentences are often about recapping or saying things in a more simple, declarative way. There is another reason, really, which is just to do with the music of the writing. At the end of every sentence, there is what’s called a cadence, which is a slightly dying fall when you say it out loud that your voice drops at the end. And if you vary the distance between those cadences by varying the length of your sentences, it will make your writing much more fresh and musical and give it a voice. So, those are my two bits of advice. Make sure your journal articles are about one big thing and make sure your sentences vary in their length.

Marnie Jo Petray: I’m Dr. Marnie Jo Petray, associate professor of TESOL at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, where I teach applied and theoretical linguistics and research issues in linguistic discrimination and the scholarship of teaching and learning in linguistics. I’d like to talk today about how all early career academics and others interested in expanding their publication output, but especially second language writers of English, can benefit from adopting global English features in their academic writing. Content Wranglers Greg Adams and Matthew Cowell offer more insights about this in their free BrightTALK webinar, Clear and Simple, Lower Your Content Costs with Global English, which you can check out for yourself. But a handful of their strategies for writing clearer and more effective content stand out as sound advice for academic writers. From the sociolinguistic study of world Englishes, we know in simple terms that varieties of English around the globe take on the local flavor of languages of the region. So, writing in Indian English may sound and read differently than writing in Nigerian or Canadian or British or American English. Global written English is a variety that targets an international audience and avoids ambiguity for these readers, whether they are native English speakers, second language English speakers, other language users who access academic writing via translation software or even the visually impaired. And a bonus is that for those in disciplines whose work is translated into other languages, global written English is also more easily translated.

Marnie Jo Petray: Scholars can implement a handful of particular techniques to achieve clear and more effective academic writing. One problem is that long and complex sentences increase the chance for ambiguity and losing the main point. And a strategy to address this is for writers to limit sentences to 20 to 30 words. However, writers should not omit syntactic cues like determiners, small words like “a” and “the,” “this,” “that,” “these,” which are needed to interpret meaning correctly. Another problem is passive voice and noun-heavy writing, which also increase ambiguity and lessen clarity. A strategy to solve this dilemma is that writers should use active voice, not passive voice. Active voice requires the agent of the action to be named, helping clarify meaning and make writing more impactful, also usually in fewer words. Further, noun forms created from verbs or adjectives frequently found in passive voice constructions can also make writing more difficult to understand because they allow the doer of the implied verb to be unnamed. So writers should use action verbs instead of noun forms, especially those ending in T-I-O-N, A-T-I-O-N and -ment. So for example, use react instead of reaction. A third common problem is ambiguous pronoun reference, and writers should make sure their pronouns have clear antecedents that identify their meaning. For example, the sentence, our revised curriculum features stackable credits, which has increased student recruits. The antecedent of the word which is unclear, and a clear revision would be, we revised our curriculum to include stackable credits. This update has increased student recruits. So these three techniques, evidenced in global English corpus research, are simple but effective ways to improve the impact and clarity of academic writing.

Stone Meredith: Hi, I’m Dr. Stone Meredith. I’m an online college instructor and I teach a variety of subjects in the humanities, the entire gamut in English studies, a little philosophy of the Western world here and there, and my research interests are pretty diverse. A big factor in my publication process about those research interests is the fact that I’m a remote teacher, and I’ve been a remote teacher since long before the pandemic. So, for about 20 years, I’ve been working mostly from home and connecting with institutions and students and research projects that were far away from me, sometimes across the country, sometimes across the world. So, I want to offer some tips about how I’ve stayed current in my field, how I’ve remained active in publication. And the secret is collaboration. So, the first step is to collaborate with those who are already talking in your field. A lot of times, in the beginning stages of my process, especially remotely, I would have this great idea. I would come across something, maybe in the literature I was studying, and I would find a new thread and I would write it up and send it to a publication. They would say, Well, it’s really interesting, but that’s really not the way we talk about that idea. So, step number one: read a lot of back issues. Learn how the field and the individual journals are talking about the idea you’re working with. And that way, you can kind of collaborate by joining those giants who are trying to stand on their shoulders, right? Maybe you’ve heard that idea. Learn what’s being said and how they talk about it, and help your idea become collaborative in that history of ideas in the subject you’re writing about. So, the first way to collaborate is join the conversation that’s already going on.

Stone Meredith: Now, how do we actually get that product once we have found that collaboration in the field? Well, the next step is to reach out and find like minds. And we’re so lucky to be living in this digital age where it’s very easy to form writing groups of peers on your own. Some people prefer to do it. Maybe I email you a paper, and that’s such a good feeling. Okay, I’ve emailed this paper out, I don’t have to worry about it until I get that feedback back. So, maybe you do it asynchronously, where you have a group of like-minds, and you say, I’ll read yours and you read mine. Or maybe you do it synchronously. Maybe you make that commitment and hold yourselves accountable, a group of two to 20 people, and say, The third Wednesday of every month, we’re going to meet and we’re going to talk about where we are in our writing. For me, I have several writing groups going, and honestly, they’re a combination of those two kinds of collaboration. I’ll give you an example. I work with the Rocky Mountain College English Association, and we have a virtual conference every year. We put a journal out from the proceedings of that conference, and those of us who want to go on and publish those proceedings, we gather about every six weeks and we hold each other accountable for how we’re coming along with our idea that we’ll publish in this Johns Hopkins journal. So we meet regularly, and in between those meetings, we’re sending drafts of our papers back and forth with our partners. It may sound elaborate at first, but you’ll be surprised how quickly it grows. Four years ago, this organization was just getting off the ground. And as we prepare for our conference next month, we’ve got our first journal coming out from Johns Hopkins University Press, in which every article written by one of our members was completed in that peer writing group. Pretty impressive if we do say so ourselves. So, again, my advice: collaborate with the conversation already going on and then find your tribe. Form that synchronous or asynchronous online writing group, and you’ll get two benefits. You can hold yourself accountable in those Zoom or virtual meetings, and you can also get a little bit of relief and take a break from the paper when you send it out for peer review with colleagues that you trust. Thanks for listening. Happy writing and be well.

Anne Wilson: I’m Anne Wilson, a Royal Literary Fund consultant fellow, and I run workshops to help researchers develop their academic writing, improving style, for example, or thinking more creatively about argument and structure. Today, I’d like to give you two simple exercises to try next time you’re writing an article or a chapter for publication. But first, a reminder: writing, even academic writing, is communication, so your readers matter. Your first draft may be for you to work out your ideas, but then you need to focus firmly on the reader. Your brilliant research and original argument may fall on deaf ears unless you consider the person reading it. So, the first exercise: think about the last article you read. Pick one. What did you read first? The title? The abstract? What next? What were you looking for? How easily did you find it? Note down your answers. Next, turn to your own writing and ask the same questions. What are your readers looking for? What will they read first? What will interest them most? Your insights about your readers can help you reconsider your structure. Try putting your main conclusions in the first few sentences to be explained and justified later. Perhaps you’ve given too much detail on a point your reader doesn’t care about. Cut it out. If there are common misconceptions about your topic, you could confront these first. There are many ways to tell a story. Use your experience as a reader to guide you in telling yours. And by the way, if you can’t quite picture your readers, delve deep into the publication’s guide for submissions. They know their readers inside out.

Anne Wilson: The second exercise can be done either before or after your first draft. Imagine your reader has agreed to meet for coffee and they’re short of time. They want you to summarise your argument in a few, let’s say nine sentences. Can you do it? Try this with Post-it notes first so you can swap the points around and make sure they’re in the right order. Then, reading aloud, record them on your phone. Listen to your final version and imagine your reader’s reaction. This exercise can tighten your argument so the reader feels you know exactly where you’re going. Some of the researchers I work with share the nine-point structure with their supervisors or co-authors before writing the first draft. They say that reflecting on the skeleton argument before writing makes the process more efficient. But remember, the nine points are the takeout for your reader, the story they want to hear rather than the story you want to tell.

Avi Staiman: Hi, this is Avi Staiman, CEO and founder of Academic Language Experts. I want to talk about six reasons why your article could potentially be rejected. These aren’t the only six reasons, but these are six reasons that are very common and that I see in my line of work on a really day-to-day basis. First and foremost, I want to start off with the technical formatting. And this may seem sort of a minor point, but actually, the reason I start out with this is because many journals today receive so many submissions and they’re simply inundated with potential articles that they can publish. And therefore, those that don’t meet their specific requirements, whether it’s the number of words in the article, whether it’s whether the formatting has matched, let’s say, you wrote it according to MLA, but they asked for APA or Harvard or Chicago. It’s really important to make sure you follow exactly the guidelines that they ask you to do because oftentimes they won’t even look at it if it’s not formatted accordingly and properly according to the journal. There are times where they will look at it anyway and then give you an answer, but it simply reduces your chances for success. The second and maybe the first thing you should be doing when you’re starting to even think out your article before you put it down on paper is that an article are rejected because they don’t fall within the aims and scope of the journal, which means that you need to be looking at the journal, opening up their aims and scopes, which is where they define for you exactly what it is that they’re interested in, and see if there’s a connection between your article and your research and the target journal of where you’re hoping to publish in. Now, I will add that it’s not simply enough merely to look at the aims and scope. I would look at the last three issues of the journal and see if there is anything in common between the research that I’m working on and something that’s already been published. Am I continuing a conversation that’s already been started in some way and actually adding to the research? That’s what’s going to interest the prospective journal because they’re going to say, oh, we’ve started a conversation on this piece. You’re continuing it. You’re adding to it. You’re critiquing it. This actually adds to a live, dynamic conversation. We’re interested in publishing your research.

Avi Staiman: The third reason articles are very typically rejected is that the procedures or analysis are seen as defective. So, obviously, methodology is a really critical point here. And it’s really important that you’re using the most updated methodology in the field. If you’re not familiar, make sure you do your homework ahead of time to make sure that the methods and procedures that you’re using are up to date. The fourth reason that articles are rejected is because their conclusions are exaggerated or simply aren’t justified. You may have done everything perfectly right in your research, but if at the end of the study you write certain conclusions that are an exaggeration of what you’ve actually found, so it actually undermines the basis of the believability and reliability of the remainder of your research. And it actually happened once where we saw an article that was rejected, even though it was a fantastic article, because the scholar sort of overreached on their conclusions and came to certain conclusions that weren’t really justified in the data itself. The fifth reason that articles are rejected is because they’re simply an extension of another paper. There isn’t enough novelty. You haven’t necessarily done something which is really different and unique and special. It’s also possible that you think it’s different, unique and special, but you haven’t necessarily conveyed that or properly to the journal editor, and that’s really important. And finally, the sixth reason why, and last reason why articles are rejected is because they’re simply not easy enough to understand. That could be because of language, that could be because of writing style, clarity, but it’s really important that you write in a way where the reviewers are going to be able to focus on the arguments themselves and not trying to parse the exact ideas that you’re trying to say because your writing is stilted or convoluted or maybe is not in an English that’s easy enough for the reviewers and editors to understand. So, those are the six reasons that articles are most typically rejected. By knowing those reasons, hopefully, you’ll be able to try and avoid them and much success in your publications.

Gaillynn Clements: Hi, I’m Dr. Gaillynn Clements, and I teach linguistics at Duke University in North Carolina in the United States. I, along with Avi Staiman of Academic Language Experts, and Dr. Petray of Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, penned an article for Times Higher Ed back in February that was published of this year. And it’s titled, It’s Time to End Linguistic Discrimination in Academic Publishing. That article kind of separates out what publishers could do to really work with authors and contributors more closely on editing services and things like that, and to be more open at the initial stages of when pieces are submitted. At the same time, it also talks and gives some ideas of what universities could do to begin to support PhD students and newly hired faculty a bit more. Much of that centers around non-native English speakers, but there are times when native English speakers receive similar feedback from a publication house. I think in the article we mentioned, there’s a particular Irish professor who teaches at Dublin City College and has a PhD and submitted an article to some publishing company and was basically received a response that said you should have a native English speaker help you revise this and resubmit. And of course he is a native English speaker. It’s just Irish English that he speaks, but he is an academic and so his brand of Irish English is academic in nature. But this is the case for people that speak different kinds of English around the world, whether English is your first language, second or third. You might be an English speaker in India or Japan or China or Brazil or have a different kind of English from the British Isles. You might be American and have a different dialect that you speak your academic English with or a different accent. And so all those things play into how a publication company reads your work. Sometimes it even can be in the research of the article that was published in February, it can even be your name or the university that you’re affiliated with that has a publication company thinking that you sound a certain way or will write a certain way. And so all of those things need to really be looked at. We need to manage our biases. We need to acknowledge that we have them and begin to work through them. The main reason for that is because we have a lot of young, really dynamic new PhDs, new faculty members coming in as junior colleagues, and they really are working with some really wonderful ideas, great data, depending on the fields that they’re in. And they have solid methodology and good analysis that’s backed up by their data. And those voices are sometimes being left out if they’re not being published. And sometimes, certainly in the article we mentioned, some people get turned down so many times they kind of turn away from academics or things like that may occur. So what we have to do is make sure that we as people affiliated with universities and with publication companies are working with people that might sometimes write a little differently than we do. Their style might be a different, the structure of their sentences might be different, but if it’s accessible and readable and understandable, not turning that person away because their writing is a bit different.

Gaillynn Clements: So one of the other things that the article doesn’t mention, but that I’ve been thinking about is something that Dr. Petray and I were working with some other editors on a publication for Cambridge University Press at this moment. And one of the things we’ve actively been doing is going out and trying to find people who are maybe not native English speakers or they’re not working with English data or they’re not in a university in the U.S., and they’re some, you know, in other countries, and they have maybe different native languages and different perspectives, right, that they analyze their work through and different methodologies. As we work to include those as contributors in our book, and that is published and disseminated, it’s a long process, of course, right? But as people begin to see there are different kinds of academic Englishes around the world and there are different ways that some ideas can be presented here or there, again, if they’re accessible and understandable and readable to the average English speaker around the world or the average academic, if the science is there and the data is there, why should we leave those voices out? So sometimes maybe actively pursuing those voices would be something we can also do.

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