Foreword

In a way, this book represents an other brother. Consider a classic parallel. Alexander von Humboldt remains famous for his scientific discoveries, including the ocean current that bears his name. His brother William, despite having deeply affected German and American universities, is generally forgotten. It was he, as state minister of education and organizer of the University of Berlin (1810), who set the precedent for hiring professors more on the basis of their skills as researchers than as teachers.
The irony in this far_reaching decision is that for all the complaints it continues to elicit, we have neglected to study its effects in systematic fashion. We still do not really know if involvement in research and scholarship impedes teaching. And we still have a sketchy record of helping professors thrive as writers. So it is that we know far more about the reasons why some writers procrastinated (say, the mathematician Gauss, a contemporary of the von Humboldt brothers) than about why others wrote fluently (say, Voltaire).
Consider a more recent analogue. In the modern discipline of faculty development, support for professorial writing remains on the margin as the other brother. As a rule, programs for faculty are run by instructional development specialists whose efforts omit help with writing and publishing. Titles of the most beloved books in faculty development tell the story of exclusion: Turning Professors into Teachers (Joseph Katz, Macmillan), Teaching Tips (William McKeachie, Heath), Improving College Teaching (Maryellen Weimer, Jossey_Bass). Even the cutting_edge serial in the area excludes assistance in scholarship and publishing: New Directions for Teaching and Learning. And, to complete this brief overview, books about higher education generally relegate research and writing to villainous roles as underminers of teaching (e.g., Page Smith’s Killing the Spirit, Viking). Academic writing, for all its supposed importance to survival in professorial careers, has gotten little favorable or useful press, Still, there is promise.
Consider my own experiences in faculty development as an example of the marginalized but improving status accorded to support programs for scholarly writing. Two decades ago I was apparently one of the first academics to travel from campus to campus with workshops for professors as writers. The instructional developers who shared in the responsibility for recruiting me were often ambivalent (“I hope this won ‘t give the wrong message about how much we value teaching here”) and skeptical (“I doubt that we’ll get more than a handful of faculty to attend; our people already know how to write”). Their colleagues, however, enthusiastically oversubscribed workshops; the faculty had no doubts about their potential helpfulness. My own surveys conducted as I came to these campuses suggested that some 60_ to 80 percent of their faculty were writing and publishing far less than they considered minimally desirable. The same respondents saw their silence, discomfort, and invisibility as primary disappointments. Faculty developers, once they saw the need for writing supports, grew more accepting of the idea.
In the national organization for faculty developers, POD (Professional and Organizational Development Network), nurturance for writing is also finding an overdue acceptance. A decade ago, POD simply diverted my proposals for conference papers. Five years later, ambivalence had replaced rejection (reviewers asked, “Is this really faculty development; would it be a disservice to sanction it?”). Only a year ago, I was asked to conduct a preconference POD workshop on managing scholarly writing amid busy schedules for faculty developers; it was well attended and well received. In that same year, I finally got past the gatekeepers of higher education journals with a manuscript reporting my long_term studies of faculty need for help with research and writing. The results of those repeated interviews and observations are relevant here. While we might readily suppose that new hires come to campus without proper grounding as teachers, my studies indicate similar deficits in managing writing and publishing. Not only did new faculty fail to find time, support, and ideas for writing; they often lacked a clear conception of how to format and prepare manuscripts for publication. Sadly, the new faculty most in peril of failing as writers and as professors were women and minorities.
What fosters this change in the acceptability of addressing needs for help with writing? As academe persists in democratizing and diversifying its faculty, perhaps it sees the need to protect its investments with support programs that include aid for writing and publishing. And, while their colleagues seemed to pause, feminists such as Sandra Scarr took the lead in sharing the secrets of academic productivity and visibility the tacit knowledge transmitted more selectively by old boy networks. In my recent travels, I see another hint of promise. Most campuses now have one or more designated professors assuming increasing responsibility for assisting colleagues with writing and publishing.
There are commonalities among these new kinds of faculty developers. They tend to be younger rather than older. They bring a record of productivity and a sense of enthusiasm to the endeavor. And they openly share practical intelligence about thriving as academic writers, often by assembling and sharing the experience of other successful and altruistic colleagues. Without fail, in my observations, their services meet with heavy and appreciative demand. This is where the present book, Publish, Don’t Perish, comes in. At last the thawing has produced a tried and published compilation of the kinds of advice and direction being disseminated on some campuses. Here, as the inevitable next step in that increasing flow, is a thorough_going alternative to the information being independently (and inefficiently) reassembled across colleges and universities.
Consider, finally, what the author of Publish, Don’ t Perish, Joe Moxley, offers that is especially promising. First of all, he prescribes simple and practical strategies for academic writers (e.g., prewriting schemes for searching the literature; organizational devices such as free_written drafts; guidelines for generating ideas such as a double_entry system of note keeping that encourages writers to dialogue with what they are reading). Second, he debunks myths that can stymie writers (e.g., beliefs that writers always enjoy writing, that gifted scholars criticize their work during its formative stages). Third, he outlines the activities that campuses and professional organizations must address if the 85 to 90 percent of usually silent faculty members are to stand up publicly and say “This is who I am” in print (e.g., he points out that institutions must attend as much to quality as to quantity of scholarly writing; that journals must help humanize the peer_review system). Finally, Joe Moxley models and explains the basics of composition theory/practice in ways that promote effective organization, writing, and editing. As an award_winning teacher of writing, an insightful theorist in composition, and a widely published writer, he does all of these things with compelling ease. In the end, Joe Moxley offers just the sort of exemplar essential to credibility in a topic traditionally kept in the backwaters.

Robert Boice
Stony Brook, New York

Acknowledgments

I am particularly indebted to the University of South Florida for offering me a sabbatical so that I could write this book and complete several other projects. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Marilyn Brownstein at Greenwood Press for encouraging me to write this book, to Barbara Goodhouse for her careful copyediting, and to Nita Romer for her work on the book’s design. In addition, I thank Lagretta Lenker at the Division of Lifelong Learning and Provost G. G. Meisels for their unflagging support of my workshops with university faculty. Finally, I thank my wife, Pat Hemmens Moxley, for her continued support.

Introduction

At first glance academic publishing appears to be a healthy, thriving enterprise. In the sciences alone, it has been estimated that “two journal articles are published every minute” (Coughlin A4).
Since the l900s, “only 2_3 percent of all manuscripts make it into book form” (Aronowitz 44; Parsons 51). Because university presses, journals, and trade_book publishers reject manuscripts by the ton, it may seem logical to assume that too much emphasis is placed on publishing in academia. With thousands of pages being printed each day, scholars appear to be having a difficult time even reading each other’s work. In a survey of “papers published in 1984 and the citations they accumulated through 1988″ of a database that included 10 percent of all scientific journals published worldwide, David Pendlebury found that few scholars are citing each other’s work: physics has about 37 percent uncited, medicine 46 percent, mathematics 55 percent, engineering 72 percent, and social sciences 74 percent (Hamilton 25). Perhaps, as numerous critics have contended, scholars do not read other scholars’ work because so much of it is poorly written. Or perhaps scholarship should take a back seat to teaching. Perhaps the critics are right: maybe we should worry more about preserving the Canadian forests than publishing academic monographs.
In truth, however, a much stronger argument can be made for the opposite case: academicians are not publishing enough. While this argument may seem spurious in light of the avalanche of manuscripts publishers receive, we can find convincing support for it. First, research suggests that the bulk of scholarship is produced by a relatively small number of scholars: only about 10 to 20 percent of our colleagues appear to be responsible for the bulk of what is published (Jalongo; Boyer; Sykes). In “Why Academicians Don’t Write,” Robert Boice and Ferdinand Jones conclude: “The median number of scholarly publications for even the most prolific disciplines like psychology is zero. Most academicians who do write contribute infrequently; as few as 10 percent of writers in specific areas account for over 50 percent of the literature” (568). Strangely, as Boice and Jones point out in their review article, we have failed to question why so few of us write and publish our ideas. Before assuming that too much publishing is occurring, we should consider the implications of having most of the scholarship produced by a limited number of scholars, many of them relatively inexperienced junior faculty writing to gain tenure. Although academicians’ careers are often controlled by what they publish, few researchers have questioned how editorial decisions are made, how academicians write, or how academic literature is used.
While scholars have been silent about how they develop and publish ideas, most institutions and professional organizations have failed to provide guidance or support for scholarly publishing. Few institutions provide workshops in writing and marketing scholarly manuscripts. As a result, some academicians are unaware of prewriting, revising, and editing strategies. Because our culture tends to mystify and aggrandize the creative process, many academicians are unaware of how productive authors work. They are often naïve about how politics and subjective factors taint the editorial process. Many academicians are unaware of the aggressive marketing strategies they may need to publish their work. Instead of providing a helping hand, the implicit message that scholars, institutions, and professional organizations give about scholarly publishing is sink or swim, publish or perish.
Yet, we should seriously question what would happen if more academicians published. Perhaps the educational crisis facing Americans would be diminished if we encouraged greater participation. This may seem like an extreme statement, yet let us recall whom we are talking about the professoriate, leading experts in their disciplines. After all, silence does not necessarily correlate with a lack of originality. If we involve more than 10 percent of the professoriate in scholarly publishing, we could hope for solutions to some of the major problems confronting our society. With more contributions being made by some of our country’s brightest people, we could hope for longer, healthier lives. Perhaps medical researchers could find a cure for AIDS, environmental scientists could stop global warming, engineers and physicists could develop a cheap alternative to petroleum. If professors read and wrote more, we would probably see major transformations in what books are assigned and published and in what research Methods are deemed appropriate. Nonpublishing instructors could cast off their role as technicians and become producers of knowledge. Insightful students who are mimicking our behaviors would see that learning and education are ongoing processes, that publishing scholarship promotes intellectual invigoration.
While this conjecture may seem exaggerated, it is actually based on one of the firmest findings of researchers in the field of composition and rhetoric: writing is a generative, thought_provoking process. We don’t sit down and record our thoughts. Instead, we often discover our most inspired ideas when writing. Sometlmes our clumsiest, weakest beginnings evolve, surprisingly, into our most elegant introductions. A day when we feel sluggish and lackluster can suddenly become one of our most inspired days.
Because writing promotes original thought, we can expect encouraging more scholars to participate in scholarly writing to result ln more innovative thinking. If more academicians wrote, we could expect breakthroughs in scientific and humanistic disciplines Once scholars gain momentum, sentences bump against each other and make us ask “Why?” and “So what?” This questioning process can spark revelations that ignite our passion and curiosity. Foriust as we know that gravity exists, so do we know that innovative ideas occur when our sentences and paragraphs bump into each other, causing us to rethink assumptions and observations.

HOW CAN THIS BOOK HELP YOU PUBLISH SCHOLARLY DOCUMENTS?
In this book I offer suggestions for developing, polishing, and publishing scholarly ideas based on my own experience as an academic writer, on composition theory and research, and on the recommendations of colleagues who have enrolled in the scholarly writing workshops that I have been teaching at the University of South Florida since the fall of 1988. My hope is that this book will help you publish ideas that are important to you and to the members of your discipline. Ultimately, as I argue more fully in the concluding chapter of this book, I hope that institutions, professional organizations, and scholars can work together to reconsider what constitutes scholarship, to reject the arbitrary wedge between scholarship and teaching, and to provide more information about composing and marketing strategies.
While I have attempted to write a practical how_to book, I have also addressed the politics and problems of scholarly publishing. For instance, instead of saying, “Here’s how to write a book review: a, b, c,” I have also explained why it may not be in your best interests to write book reviews. While my perspective is inevitably shaped by my work in composition and rhetoric, I have tried to incorporate comments made by colleagues in other disciplines.
I have deliberately written short chapters so that you can easily find what you need. Part I provides an overview of the working habits and attitudes of successful academic writers. In the early stages of composing, I encourage you to play the believing game__that is, to have faith that inchoate ideas will find form and substance through drafting. If you have trouble finding time to write or if you are unsure about how to develop scholarly projects, chapters 1 through 4 should be especially useful to you. Chapter 5 provides marketing techniques and exarriines the politics and editorial policies of scholarly publishing.
Part II analyzes the conventions of various scholarly genres, such as abs~acts, introductions, conclusions, book reviews, quantitative and qualitative research articles, book proposals, and grant proposals. While the opening chapters encourage authors to play the believing game when composing the early drafts, Part III explains how to play the doubting game how to attack your manuscript as your critics do. Chapter 16 reviews the critical questions that readers are likely to ask when evaluating your documents. In turn, Chapter 17 offers editorial strategies for making your sentences economical, precise, and concise.
In the concluding chapter “Where Can We Go from Here?”__I address the critics of higher education who have accused us of abandoning the classroom. In particular, I critique how we have defined scholarship and driven an arbitrary wedge between teaching and research. Finally, I outline changes that institutions, professional organizations, and scholars need to make in order to motivate faculty to engage in scholarly writing and publishing.

WORKS CITED
Aronowitz, Stanley. “A Writer’s Union for Acadcmics?” Thought and Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal 4:2 (Fall 1988): 41-46.
Boice, Robert, and Ferdinand Jones. “Why Academicians Don’t Write.” Journal of Higher Education 55 (September/Octobcr 1984): 567_582.

Boyer, Ernst. Quoted in “The New York Times Education Summer Survey.” New York Times, 18 August 1985: 36.
Coughlin, Ellen. “Concerns about Fraud, Editorial Bias Prompt Scrutiny of Journal Practices.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 February 1989: A4_A7.
Hamilton, David P. “Research Papers: Who’s Uncited Now?” Science 251 (January 1991): 25.
Jalongo, Mary Renck. “Faculty Productivity in Higher Education.” Educational Forum 49 (Winter 1985): 171_1 X2 .
Parsons, Paul. Getting Published: The Acquisition Process as University Presses. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.
Sykes, Charles J. ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988.