Sitting down to write a scholarly research paper can be a bit of a challenge. Take it from someone who is currently working on his first research paper since Undergrad and is dreading an eventual dissertation. I tried to get some advice from someone who knows a thing or two about scholarly writing. Enter Dr. Chad Morgan.
Dr. Morgan is a professor in the Information and Library Science Department at North Carolina Central University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003 and published his first book, Planters’ Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia, in 2005. He is also the author by his count of 14 scholarly journal articles to date, and he offered up some sound advice about the scholarly writing process from the standpoint of both a writer and an educator.
As a writer, do you think there are specific areas in which you have improved since your first writing submission?
Yes. I think my clarity and concision are greatly improved. I think that comes, in part, from having graded as much as I have and having seen what prevents many people from expressing themselves as clearly as they would like. So teaching and writing can be complementary in that way. What I don’t have that I had in 2000, when I submitted my first article, is the time to do as much research as I would like.
Do you think it’s always important to have another set of eyes copyedit your papers before submitting it for publication? If so, why?
Yes, absolutely. After looking at a text for a while, you will not see errors that you might have picked up on a first read. The text just becomes too familiar.
As a college professor who has examined numerous papers over your career, what are some common errors that tend to plague student writers and what can they do to avoid these mistakes?
I would say the number one thing that trips students up is an impulse to dress up their prose with fancy words. Often such words obfuscate meaning. I think writing simple, declarative sentences in active voice is the best advice novice writers in any discipline could take. If you’re not conveying your meaning, you have nothing.
Do you have any specific advice for people who are looking to submit articles for scholarly publication in the future?
Yes. As long as the content is good, it’s okay to leave the text a little rough around the edges. This gives reviewers—who have to say something, anyway—some fairly obvious fixes, and they don’t have to go looking for something else.
