The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing (review)

Imagine sitting down with thirty-three current or retired faculty members or scholar-practitioners (and three doctoral students) and having a wide-ranging conversation about writing for scholarly publication. Imagine that these individuals hail from or are affiliated with institutions in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. And imagine that you are a member of the target audience: a graduate student or a new faculty member—or perhaps a faculty member who teaches and mentors such individuals. What would you discuss? You might ask questions about how to think about and approach writing for publication; how to improve qualities of your own writing, such as voice and authority; how to prepare scholarly manuscripts; and how to navigate other issues, including how to understand and address reviewers' comments, how to interpret various cross-cultural concerns, how to work effectively with co-authors, and how to serve as a writing mentor. Wait—I forgot something important. Imagine that the majority of those gathered come from the fields of adult education and human resource development. Now you know better what to expect. Your conversation partners will predominantly espouse social-scientific epistemologies and paradigms; they will presume that your work likely operates at the nexus of theory and practice; and they will take for granted that the peer-reviewed journal article is at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of 'most valued publication types' (13).

Such is the context of The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing, a handsome volume edited by two professors of adult education and human resource development, Tonette Rocco (Florida International University) and Tim Hatcher (North Carolina State University). One of the first things I noticed, unexpectedly, upon picking up a copy,¹ was the number of names I recognized. (Disclosure: I worked with contributor Andrea Ellinger of the University of Texas at Tyler on the program for the 2009 conference of the Academy of Human Resource Development; many of the contributors to this volume were involved with that meeting.) I had presumed that the book, with a title that seems to be all-encompassing, would also accommodate at least readers in the humanities, if not those in the science, technology, and engineering fields. Indeed, I should have taken a cue from the publisher, Jossey-Bass, whose key lists focus on such applied fields as education, business, psychology, and public health. In short, if you recognize the name of the author of the foreword (John Creswell of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) or have used Jossey-Bass books for your own education and research, then you're likely to benefit from this book.

Capped by an annotated appendix of topically organized supplemental readings, the twenty-one chapters of the book are divided into four roughly equal parts: preliminaries on 'Becoming a Published Scholar,' suggestions on 'Improving Writing Techniques,' guidance on 'Preparing Scholarly Manuscripts,' and commentaries on 'Reflecting on the Writing and Publishing Process.' True to handbook form, advice is spread throughout the volume. Yet a curiosity of several of the chapters in the 'Preparing Scholarly Manuscripts' portion, especially, is the attention given not to the writing, revising, or submitting of such manuscripts, per se, but to matters that should be sorted out even before a study is designed or carried out in the first place. (A more descriptive title for this part would have been 'Preparing Research Projects for Eventual Dissemination as Scholarly Manuscripts.' Remember, too, the social-scientific slant: Throughout the bulk of this volume, 'scholarly manuscript' is equated with 'peer-reviewed journal article.') A welcome curiosity it is, though, as I am sceptical of books on writing for publication that disembody the act of writing from the reading, the thinking, and the multitude of other acts that underlie the generation of text worth sharing with one's disciplinary peers. In chapter 11, for example, 'Writing a Literature Review...