A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies by Mary Jane Curry, Theresa Lillis (review)

In a February 2014 Inside Higher Ed essay, Elizabeth Simmons of Michigan State University proposed that scholars ‘deliberately apply the principles’ they ‘learned in graduate school and adopt a scholarly approach’ to their academic careers.¹ Reading Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis’s A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies reminded me of Simmons’s suggestion. Curry and Lillis’s book—despite having the word guide in its title—is not so much a how-to book as it is a volume crafted to help its readers start to understand scholarly publishing ‘in terms of practices, institutions and politics’ (4). By shifting the focus away from language and writing, and by presenting series of heuristics instead of prescriptive propositions, the authors deliver both context and (loaded) questions to contemplate, not disembodied ideas to implement. Thus Curry and Lillis take, and encourage readers to take, Simmons’s ‘scholarly approach’ to their topic, and they do so in a way that transcends disciplinary and other academic and cultural boundaries.

Intending their book to be useful to scholars ‘living and writing outside of Anglophone contexts’ (2) who wish to publish in English as well as to those who support these individuals’ publishing activities—advisers, colleagues, and various other ‘literacy brokers,’ including translators and editors—Curry (University of Rochester, US) and Lillis (Open University, UK) base their presentation on material from a data set that they analyzed in fuller detail in an earlier co-authored volume.² The ethnographic and textual data include ‘text histories’—‘interviews, field notes, scholars’ writings and their correspondence with journal gatekeepers’ (7)—collected during an eight-year study of fifty scholars of education and psychology from Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal. The book presents numerous ‘data examples’ that provide, in words gathered from these scholars, perspectives and ideas that astute readers can reflect upon or borrow. Although their examples originate from the social sciences (and particularly from fields lambasted by Helen Sword in her Stylish Academic Writing),³ Curry and Lillis emphasize that many of the strategies and choices they present are relevant to scholars in other disciplines.⁴ They focus their volume on the scholarly journal article over the book since, in many disciplines, refereed journal publications ‘function as the primary “currency” of academia, playing a key role in building scholars’ reputations and in institutional decisions to hire, promote, and tenure scholars as well as for research funding’ (10).

Their book, then, is timely and necessary, given the current global context of multilingual scholarly activity that ‘increasingly sets a premium on using—and publishing in—English’ (1). Introductory and concluding chapters fittingly bookend the volume, invoking the roles of networks, resources, and politics that undergird the social practices of academic writing and scholarly publishing. These chapters encourage participants to engage with present debates over knowledge production: the dominance of citation indexes, the idea of open access journals, and—most central to the book—the very ‘role of English in the global academic marketplace’ (160). Sixteen chapters in between, averaging just nine pages each, reflect an order intending to mirror common writing processes and publishing timelines. These chapters all follow a similar template, ending with sections entitled ‘Thinking about your practice,’ ‘Suggestions for future action,’ ‘Useful resources,’ and ‘Related research.’ The ‘Suggestions for future action’ section emphasizes writing as a social process; several suggestions begin with ‘Ask colleagues,’ ‘Talk with colleagues about,’ or ‘Discuss with colleagues. . . .’ The ‘Related research’ sections present annotated pairs of articles, chapters, or books that introduce research on writing and publishing beyond the two focal disciplines and four European cultural and linguistic contexts emphasized in this volume. Some...