Writing Education Research: Guidelines for Publishable Scholarship by Joy Egbert and Sherry Sanden (review)

How much does the success of a scholarly journal manuscript depend on the writing, and how much depends on the research itself? (At minimum, success here means acceptance for publication, but publication alone is neither metric nor marker of making a lasting contribution to a field.) In Writing Education Research: Guidelines for Publishable Scholarship, Joy Egbert and Sherry Sanden highlight the strong connection between research and writing by framing their presentation as a response to sample reviewers’ comments on manuscript submissions in the field of education. This novel approach makes their work more reflexive than prescriptive, and it foregrounds manuscript and article readers’ needs and expectations. The result, though, is a text that might require additional context to be of use to the true beginner.

Egbert, professor of education at Washington State University, and Sanden, assistant professor of early childhood literacy at Illinois State University, had previously teamed up to write Foundations of Education Research: Understanding Theoretical Components, also published by Routledge (2014). Writing Educational Research shares a similar design and some of the same structural elements, including reflection exercises throughout the chapters and guided practice exercises at the ends of chapters, the latter of which involve delving into the substantial appendixes that fill out each volume. (Appendixes contribute 40 per cent of each book’s pages.)

The authors’ goal with this text is straightforward: to address ‘how to present research so that it comes across to readers as clear, logical, useful, and justified—in other words, publishable’ (13). On this point Egbert and Sanden succeed. My favourite features of the text are the offset ‘language notes’ sprinkled throughout the middle six of the book’s eight chapters. In these boxes the authors offer helpful comments about such matters as keeping style guides close at hand (and using them), being rhetorically direct in one’s intentions with a manuscript, plainly connecting the literature review to the research questions and objectives, knowing which tense to use in describing a study, clearly linking assertions to study results, and understanding the semantic difference between ‘results’ and ‘findings.’ (I wish, though, that the authors had consistently heeded their own note about data being plural. Oddly, too, this note appears in the chapter on research questions, participants, and context, not in the chapter on data collection, data analysis, and limitations.)

Another strength is the use of reviewer comments on education manuscripts as launching points for the presentations in each chapter. But that assessment is relative: I can make it because I’ve written research that was subsequently published in education journals. As a result, I know both how the review process works and why anyone would write for scholarly publication in the first place. Neither point is thoroughly addressed in this text, reminding me of the importance of the ‘why’ chapters that are typical of books in this genre. (Indeed, the best ‘how-to’ books are also ‘why-to’ books.) The opening chapter, ‘Writing and Publishing in Education,’ does a remarkable job delimiting the scope of the book: the authors clearly state that their book does not address, for example, how to create content that makes a contribution to a field or how to assess the fit of a manuscript with a particular journal. The book also does not cover how to format or edit a manuscript for ‘surface’ errors—those in grammar, mechanics, or style. Indeed, the authors point out that several books with those goals exist; they identify a number of them in a ‘recommended resources’ section.¹ In a sense, their opening chapter functions as the type of focusing section one might expect to encounter in a journal article: it sets up the readers’ expectations, for sure, but it doesn’t provide context for why the book is needed.² The opening chapter...