A Scholar's Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies

摘要

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.