Introduction

Preparing to Publish is an e-book that guides readers into the world of academic manuscript publication. The primary audience is graduate students and those who instruct them. The materials here build upon a tradition of English for Academic Purposes to provide clear guides to writing research reports. The text explores the communicative goals and strategies associated with successful academic writing and demonstrates the relationships between the sections of a manuscript.

For students and novice research writers and scholars, this book is intended as an important resource for navigating academic writing, specifically empirical research write-ups. It will help students identify functions of the research article as a whole and explore authors’ meaning as they write each section of the research article. This book will also supply strategies for understanding research writing within students’ individual disciplines and yield helpful tips for planning for, outlining, drafting, and reviewing their own research reports.

For instructors and mentors of graduate students and novice researchers, this book will serve as a valuable reference guide in helping those unfamiliar with the standards of scholarly writing to better comprehend the research writing genre. It can be used within a graduate-level class in any number of academic disciplines and/or referenced as a useful pedagogical resource for students to consult as they learn the mandatory components of the research article. Alongside research article section-specific instructional materials are real-world examples of the building blocks that make up the writing. These samples are derived from a range of authentic, published research articles from highly reputable peer-reviewed journals and were hand-selected by field-specific experts in varying academic programs.

We hope you will take time to examine the goals and strategies covered in each chapter of the book. We recommend using these elements as you explore published writing in your own field. Equipped with these new helpful tools, you will be drafting your research article with more ease, more intention, and less confusion about the type of writing you are expected to produce at this advanced academic level.