Buku BELCHER 12 WEEKS TO PUBLISHING halaman 139 - 142

Week 5

Reviewing the Related Literature

Day to Do Task	Week 5 Daily Writing Tasks	Estimated Task Time
Day 1 (Monday ?)	Read through page 163 and fill in the boxes on those pages; start documenting your time (page 169)	60 minutes
Day 2 (Tuesday ?)	Evaluate your current citations (pages 163-164)	60 minutes
Day 3 (Wednesday ?)	Identify and read the related literature (pages 164-167)	8 hours
Day 4 (Thursday ?)	Evaluate the related literature (167-168)	60+ minutes
Day 5 (Friday ?)	White or revise your relaed literature review (page 168)	120+ minutes

Above are the tasks for your fifth week lMake sure to start this week by scheduling when you will write and then tracking the time that you actuallys nd writing, This week involves a lot of reading. so makeg sure you allot enough time to othe mks.

FOURTH WEEK IN REVIEW

You have now spent four weeks working on your article. You have worked on designing a writing plan, finalizing your abstract, developing your argument and threading it throughout your article, and identifying appropriate journals for publication If you have been writing at least fifteen minutes a day, y0u are doing great!

If you are still not writing regularly or getting around to all the tasks you had hoped to do-don't feel guilty! Guilt about the past prevents you from action in the present. When you feel bad, it is difficult to get motivated. As a friend once said, you can't hate yourself into changing. Accept that developing good writing habits often takes longer than four weeks. Then shake off those negati'Ve feelings and just focus on today. Today is just as good a day to get started as yesterday, and if you are rereading this tomorrow or in a month or a year, today is still a good day to get started. Since this workbook breaks revising an article down into small steps, you have help in setting reachable goals.

No matter what you did this last week, take a minute to write in the chart below a positive message to yourself about writing. In it, be kind to yourself and be hopeful. If this makes you uneasy, remember what Samuel Johnson wisely said, that intellectuals often believe that an ”unwillingness to be pleased” is the proof of intelligence. It is "much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing," he points out (Johnson 1751). So let the embrace be a triumph over the quotidian. In academia, we tend to deity the hostile and the negative. Dare to be positive! You can also phone or e-mail a friend to do this exercise in dialogue.

Positive Message to Myself about Writing

Last week you learned that many journals need you more than you need them. You studied the various types of academic journals and which types were best for your article. Then you worked on reviewing several journals, both to evaluate their rank andto determine if they would be a good match for the article you are revising. These steps will help you in revising yOur article for a particular journal. You then worked on a query letter to the editor of prospective journals. If the editors respond, you can determine which journal would be most receptive to your article. This week you will focus on improving your literature review.

READING THE SCHOLARLY LITERATURE

As mentioned, you must relate your research to the previous researdi in order to be published. Yet, when most scholars think about reading in their field, a wave of anxiety sweeps over them. There is so much to read! With at least 200,000joumal articles published annually, and over 275,0“) new books published every yearin the United States alone (Bowker 2008),l it is impossible to keep up. Even a good reader, someone who manages to read five books a week, week in and week out, will only read 250 books a year or about 10,000 books over a career. Since most read more like one book a week, or 2,000 books total, our ability to read even a fraction of what is published in our disciplineis limited.  I was inaconference room in theearly 1990s when an older professor said he could remember when it was possible to read everything published in his field. A sigh of longing went around the room.

It is essential then to abandon the hope of being comprehensive in your reading. No one is reading everything in his or her discipline. If you stop feeling guilty about what you are not reading, you can start a plan for reading what you can.

When 1 was a graduate student, lhad the great good fortune of landing a job as an abstractor. I worked on a bibliographic project in my field in which I was required to read books and articles and write an abstract about them Over a threeyear period, I abstracted over 2,000 books and articles. l was expected to read each piece and write an abstract about it in twenty minutes. When I started the job, this requirement seemed absolutely insane. liventy minutes! To ”read" a 300-page book? I had take: a speed-reading course in high school, and the job still seemed impossible. By the end of my first year, twenty minutes still seemed too little time, but I now thought thirty minutes would do the job. What changed my mind? I learned what to look for.

When you start graduate school, reading takes a long time. You’re lucky to get through a twenty-page article in two hours. Them when you look at your reading assignments for class, much less for your own research, you can feel discouraged. When you are starting out, you must read slowly because you are still trying to get an understanding of basic concepts and approaches. Fortunately, the more you read, the easier it gets.

As you go along, you should be able to read more and more quickly. Then you will learn to skim. That’s‘ what I learned to do as an abstractor. The more I read, the moie I'learned not to read for elegant language or general information. I learned thht what I needed to know from any piece was the same: the topic, the approach, and the argument That's it To learn that, I could read the back of the book or jacket flap and the first few pages of the introduction With an article, I could read the abstract and introduction. Then I could make an informed choice about what to read more thoroughly.

Skimming is easier to do in some fields than others. The structure of science and social science articles are designed for skimming. Humanities articles that announce their project on page ten are not. Still, once you learn the conventions of your field, you can learn to skim almost anything. Once you have skimming skills, you still have a lot to read and absorb. How do you do that?

TYPES OF SCHOLARLY LITERATURE

All published journal articles cite other written materials, loosely known as "the literature." These citations of the literature fall into distinct categories. Knowing these categories can help you think about how to go about reading and citing this literature.        

Original literature. These creative or documentary texts are rarely based on other texts; they are sometimes called ”primary sources." If you are writing about fiction, novels and poetry would serve as your original literature or primary source; if you are writing about the visual arts, the images; about music, the scores; about architecture, the buildings. For instance, if you are a historian, you usually have many primary sources, from diaries and letters to newspapers and pamphlets. In the social sciences, if you are doing ethnographic or qualitative studies, the original literature consists of the words of your subjects. If you are writing about how women make economic decisions, their own words from interviews or focus groups would be your primary source. if you are analyzing govemmerit statistics, the government documents would be your primal sources. Much of what i say in this chapter doesn't apply to reading an writing about original literature. That’s because you must engage wit your original literature at a deep level; there are no shortcuts.

What is my original or primary literature for this article ?

Derivative literature. These texts for the general public are based on secondary sources (and thus are sometimes called ”tertiary literature”). This is the type of literature that tends to fill classroom papers and should not be used for journal articles. As an undergraduate, you are expected to list all your sources and so your bibliography will often include general websites. encyclopedia entries, popular magazine articles, almanacs, and textbooks. By the time you are writing for publication, these kinds of citations make up no part of your bibliography You do not need to include citations of where you found basic information such as the size of a country, the date of a text, the name of a particular year’s Nobel-prize winner, the general meaning of a term, and so on. 1119 rule is that if the information appears in many sources, and you are not quoting it directly, you do not need to cite where you found it. Of course, it is always wise to footnote the source of absolutely everything when you are writing, in case any questions arise. You can delete many of these later when submitting for publication (so long as you haven't quoted the derivative source directly). (One‘note: If you tend to get sucked into the intemet looking for basic information like correct spellings or when a person died, it is better to buy and load an electronic encyclopedia onto your hard drive. It is much easier to find information quickly in Such sources than on the intemet. The Encyclopedia Britannica is my favorite.)

One common mistake that students make is citing derivative literature when they should be citing scholarly literature. For instance, you cannot