Conley Writing for Academic Publication course

ICL 7158/8158 Writing for Academic Publication
Mondays from 5:30 PM until 8:30 PM
Ball Hall 405
Dr. Mark Conley

This course is about learning the professional discourses necessary to succeed professionally with academic writing. Within this course, we will discuss strategies for entering and finding a place within a research community. Ongoing academic writing and review of professional writing are central features of the course As such, the course helps students:

· understand the purposes of educational research, including the benefits and how education is improved through professional writing
· visualize patterns in writing within various genres and journals within educational research · engage in purposeful and successful writing for publication

The course begins with a broad overview of professional writing and research. Within this broad view is the immediate issue of concern for many exiting students, how to position themselves within research communities through vita and cover letter writing. The course next shifts to understanding writing across the continuum of qualitative, descriptive and quantitative research and how to accept and provide critiques of writing. This involves writing book reviews, commentaries and reviews of studies. Important here is the notion that researchers function in a community and succeeding as a professional requires understanding how to participate constructively in critiques.

The course then moves from critiquing to promoting students’ own agendas through professional writing. This section includes writing practitioner/practice articles, conference, grant and book proposals and creating lines of research. Finally, the course includes teaching and service-oriented writing, such as course syllabi and programmatic kinds of writing. Students will review general examples of each kind of writing genre, will be presented the underlying structures of each genre, and then will produce a piece of writing that is consistent with the principles of the genre the following class.

The culminating project for the class will be an individual, professional plan for professional writing, including artifacts representative of each student’s trajectory as a professional academic and researcher. Students planning on taking the course should email Dr. Mark Conley mwconley@memphis.edu so that the course can be tailored specifically to students’ professional interests.