Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler. Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals: Strategies for Getting Published

摘要

When I first picked up a copy of Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler's Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals: Strategies for Getting Published, I thought, 'Oh no, not again.' I had perused the promotional text on the back cover, scanned the table of contents, read the acknowledgements and introduction, and flipped through the rest of the book. I spotted unstylish and untrue (and ungrammatical) text in the promotional blurb, saw references there and in the introduction to the cliched 'secret business of academic publishing' and the academic 'writing game,' and noted invocations of Foucault and Bourdieu. I wondered, 'Is this a how-to book or an academic book?' The authors, I felt, were overly self-consciously attempting to make a contribution to their own scholarly discourse communities in sociology (Thomson) and sociolinguistics (Kamler) and, in the process, seemed to be overlooking the immediate needs of the individuals in their target audience-'early career' scholarly writers who are 'relatively new to academic publication' (3). I imagined that readers who picked up this book would be craving 'tips and tricks' (8), not theories about scholarly writing and discursive practice.