The “Writing Spiral”: A Practical Tool for Teaching Undergraduates to Write Publication-Quality Manuscripts

摘要

One of the perceived barriers to publishing with undergraduates (especially with undergraduates asfirst author; see Giuliano, 2019) is the concern that students lack the requisite writing skills tomake a significant contribution. For example, several authors in a recent special issue devotedto publishing with undergraduates (see “Engaging Undergraduates in Publishable Research: BestPractices,” Frontiers in Psychology) discuss this challenge (e.g., McKelvie and Standing, 2018;Detweiler-Bedell and Detweiler-Bedell, 2019; Reavis and Thomas, 2019; Scisco et al., 2019).Unfortunately, despite the numerous individual articles describing tips for teaching writing inpsychology (in journals such as Teaching of Psychology), as well as step-by-step books that teachstudents to improve their writing, there is no widely-accepted comprehensive resource to guidefaculty in teaching psychological writing to students (see Ishak and Salter, 2017, for a review).The purpose of this paper is to address this gap, with a focus on teaching undergraduates to writepublication-quality manuscripts. Although there are many important factors in teaching writing,one tool that I have developed—which students call “the writing spiral”—has been successfullyused to guide numerous undergraduates through the publication process1. After describing thepurpose and benefits of the writing spiral, I provide a detailed description of its contents in thehopes that interested readers might successfully incorporate some of this material into their ownwriting instruction2.