Interpreting Editorese

Even if an editor loves, loves, loves your work, she is still likely to have to shepherd it through some kind of review process — either internally, in the case of a trade house, or to external academic readers. Many manuscripts die that way, despite the "interest" of the press. Those that are not outright killed can be wounded and sent back to you for some critical care.

Toor, Rachel. Chronicle of Higher Education (2009). Articles>Publishing>Editing>Collaboration

Publication Management

A graduate seminar in intensive work developing and using systems to manage documents delivered electronically and in print using single-sourcing technologies. Theory and practice of managing publication projects across groups and organizations.

Stolley, Karl. Illinois Institute of Technology (2009). Academic>Courses>Document Design>Publishing

The Importance of "Niche" Journals To New Business-Communication Academics— and To All of Us    

This commentary, extending one published in 2007, reports on a study of publishing advice being given to new academics in business communication. The findings suggest that 'niche' journals such as the Journal of Business Communication are very important to these academics' professional advancement and are, in general, well regarded in the respondents' host departments. Such journals are essential to the scholarly conversation in specialty areas that are not well served by bigger, mainstream journals.

Rentz, Kathryn. JBC (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Publishing

Blogging, Podcasting, and Screencasting: Eight Characteristics to Attract Devoted Followers (Part II)

Devoted followers stay updated with each new post, podcast, or screencast, eagerly awaiting the next new one. They’re intimately familiar with your content and either comment regularly or regularly return to your site.

Johnson, Tom H. Tech Writer Voices (2009). Articles>Publishing>Blogging>Podcasting

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship    

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

Evans, James A. Science (2008). Articles>Research>Publishing>Online

Online vs. On-Line

This isn't a discussion of hyphenated vs. not hyphenated. It examines the difference between putting a PDF file on the Internet (what I call an on-line document) and having a truly electronic Web presence for that content (what I call an online document). Unfortunately, the two often get bundled together.

Hughes, Michael A. User Assistance (2009). Articles>Web Design>Publishing>Adobe Acrobat

If You’re a Writer, Write

Why is it that, given the opportunity and tools to write, so few embrace it? I have several thoughts as to why.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Writing>Publishing

The Construction of Author Voice by Editorial Board Members    

Studies of blind manuscript review have illustrated that readers often form impressions of or speculate about unknown authors' identities in the manuscript review task. In this article, the authors extend that work by examining the discursive and nondiscursive features that play a role in readers' active construction of author voice. Through a survey completed by 70 editorial board members of six journals in applied linguistics and rhetoric and composition, the authors identify quantitative and qualitative trends in reviewers' practices regarding voice construction. Findings indicate that many readers do build impressions of an author's identity when reviewing anonymous manuscripts and that the rhetorical nature of the review task may lead readers to attend more to some discursive features than to others.

Tardy, Christine M. and Paul Kei Matsuda. Written Communication (2009). Articles>Writing>Editing>Publishing

Symbolic Capital and Academic Fields: An Alternative Discourse on Journal Rankings    

During my 30 years in the academy, I have seen universities subject to increased demands for accountability. These demands from both internal and external publics translate into added attention to quality assessment. To evaluate teaching, universities measure student learning outcomes and rely on standardized scores as indicators of teaching effectiveness. To assess research productivity, departments document publications that appear in top-ranked journals and presses and track dollar amounts raised through external funding. This focus on evaluation, in turn, lends new credence to independent ranking systems that provide unbiased indices of quality. An unintended consequence of these academic norms, however, is the pattern of treating standards as objective indices rather than practical guidelines.

Putnam, Linda L. Management Communication Quarterly (2009). Articles>Research>Publishing>Assessment

Journal Rankings and Academic Research: Two Discourses About the Quality of Faculty Work    

Peer evaluation is the hallmark of the academic profession. Hiring, advancement, and reputation in the university setting have traditionally depended on a scholar's work as judged by his or her colleagues. The emerging trend toward journal ranking as an indicator of research accomplishment poses an important challenge to professional academic standards and to higher education generally because ranking schemes diminish the professoriate and degrade knowledge work. We argue that when scholarly journals are ranked in terms of their desirability as publication outlets they take on the characteristics of commodities.

Hogler, Raymond and Michael A. Gross. Management Communication Quarterly (2009). Articles>Publishing>Research>Assessment

Edifying Editing  

It is a management truism that having a vision based on false hypotheses is better than a lack of vision, and like all truisms it is probably false some of the time, but the same feature holds true in editing: the editor’s main job is to decide what is published, and what is not.

McAfee, R. Preston. McAfee.cc (2009). Articles>Publishing>Editing

Compliments and Criticisms in Book Reviews About Business Communication    

Research suggests that book reviews in academic journals tend to be positive but that readers prefer book reviews that include negative and positive evaluation. In this study, the author examines 48 books reviews from three business communication journals to determine whether these reviews are mainly positive. She counts compliments and criticisms, analyzing their location and topics. She also analyzes the force of the criticisms and strategies that reviewers use to mitigate criticism.

Mackiewicz, Jo M. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2007). Articles>Writing>Publishing>Research

Meta-Usability: When the Method is Not the Message

There is a necessary connection between theory and practice. But there is also a difference between the two. And that difference, as van de Snepscheut said, is larger in practice than it is in theory.

Straub, Kathleen. UI Design Newsletter (2007). Articles>Usability>Research>Publishing

Connecting Usability Education and Research with Industry Needs and Practices    

Ideally, academic research should inform workplace practices and workplace practices should inform academic research and education. However, as many researchers have noted, a gap often exists between academia and industry. This article begins to bridge that gap by reporting the results of a small-scale study at Microsoft in which 12 individuals were interviewed about their views on usability education and research. This study addressed two questions: (1) What knowledge, skills, and abilities should technical communication teachers stress in teaching usability and (2) how can academic research in usability benefit practitioners? The results indicate that usability education needs to be expanded to include additional usability evaluation methods and that students need strong critical assessment and communication skills when they enter the workplace. The results also reveal that usability research in the areas of return-on-investment, online help, and cognition would be of great use to practitioners.

Cooke, L. and S. Mings. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (2005). Articles>Usability>Research>Publishing

Examining Editor-Author Ethics: Real-World Scenarios from Interviews with Three Journal Editors    

Those who submit manuscripts to academic journals may benefit from a better understanding of how editors weigh ethics in their interactions with authors. In an attempt to ascertain and to understand editors' ethics, we interviewed 3 current academic journal editors of technical and/or business communication journals. We asked them about the ethical dilemmas they encountered while working with authors, whether the editors formally or informally followed a "code of ethics," and if they felt obligated to maintain any ethical codes in particular. In this article, we discuss the ethical dimensions of editorial practices using specific ethical scenarios provided by these three editors. We then analyze these scenarios using traditional ethical models in our field but also in terms of a less-known but powerful model of ethical analysis originally proposed by the philosopher C. S. Peirce. We argue that Peirce's "community of inquiry" ethics model best describes these journal editors' ethics when working with authors.

Amare, Nicole and Alan Manning. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2009). Articles>Publishing>Editing>Ethics

Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World

Bantamweight publishing is popular among those who feel brevity is a virtue. But when an entire work of art is bounded in 140 characters, even brevity has its limits. Sometimes, squeezing in a proper attribution through editing content can change the original meaning, when the edits unwillingly shift from cosmetic to substantive.

Drapeau, Mark. O'Reilly and Associates (2009). Articles>Publishing>Online>Plagiarism

At the Touch of a Button

Are the days of print documentation over? How ‘usable’ is your print documentation?

Nair, Manjusha. Indus (2009). Articles>Documentation>Publishing

Convergence Calls: Multimedia Storytelling at British News Websites    

This article uses qualitative interviews with senior editors and managers from a selection of the UK’s national online news providers to describe and analyse their current experimentation with multimedia and video storytelling. The results show that, in a period of declining newspaper readership and TV news viewing, editors are keen to embrace new technologies, which are seen as being part of the future of news. At the same time, text is still reported to be the cornerstone for news websites, leading to changes in the grammar and function of news video when used online. The economic rationale for convergence is examined and the article investigates the partnerships sites have entered into in order to be able to serve their audience with video content. In-house video is complementing syndicated content, and the authors examine the resulting developments in newsroom training and recruitment practices. The article provides journalism and interactive media scholars with case studies on the changes taking place in newsrooms as a result of the shift towards multimedia, multiplatform news consumption.

Thurman, Neil and Ben Lupton. Convergence (2008). Articles>Publishing>Multimedia

Three Tweets for the Web

The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—written words, music, video—have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education. The new brevity has many virtues.

Cowen, Tyler. Wilson Quarterly (2009). Articles>Publishing>Online>Minimalism

Constant Transformation Is the New Normal

There's no challenge that taxes leadership more than driving true transformation. Three pithy bullet points clearly aren't enough to crack the transformation code. But hopefully they help transformation-oriented executives — in and out of the magazine industry — to begin to move in the right direction.

Anthony, Scott. Harvard Business Review (2009). Articles>Management>Publishing