Idelber Avelar
Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese

Premise

The expectations for graduate students have risen dramatically in recent years, and publishing figures prominently among them. It is important both to understand that change and not to overestimate it. In the fields of Spanish and Portuguese, at least, the rise in expectations does not mean that you are condemned for life if you don’t publish as a graduate student (that may be true in some situations for other fields, such as English). It is important, however, to familiarize yourself with the steps, procedures, and standards of the academic publishing world, both to prepare your future and, in my personal opinion, to extract more juice, more thought, and more fun from your writing.

Recommendations:

1. Develop the habit of visiting the library periodically to look at the latest issues of the journals that interest you most. If you still don’t have a list of periodicals that you like particularly – because you haven’t read enough of them – then you start by looking at a wider array of journals. Eventually you will narrow it down to fewer, and slowly compose a map of your potential interlocutors in the field. That will also eventually indicate to you where you can, should, and would like to publish.

2. Become an MLA member as soon as possible. That will not only give you early membership in the association to which you will have to be affiliated in order to look for a job. It will provide you with the yearly edition of the MLA Manual, a subscription to PMLA (where you will see scholarly articles, an array of forums and debates, and extensive advertising from conferences and university presses), a subscription to Profession (where position papers on the state of the field are published and discussed), the MLA Newsletter, and several other promotions. The annual membership for a graduate student costs $20.

3. Discuss your work with others, read your colleagues’ work, and take positions in the debates in the field. Make sure you understand the history of these debates, the fact that they are probably older and larger than the scope of your particular work, and narrow down your writing to questions that you can argue thoroughly and knowledgeably. Be ready to compose parallels and contrasts between the several positions that precede you in the debate.

4. Make sure you understand the genres in academic publishing (position paper, conference paper, research article, dissertation or book chapter, the essay, etc.), not necessarily to respect them as sacred word, of course, but to be able to engage them competently and possibly subvert them as well.

5. As you compose your map of the journals in the field, you should begin to experience that the notion of "publishable" paper varies, fluctuates, and is defined differently from journal to journal. Besides quality, there are objective differences between approaches, styles, genres, that offer a quite wide array of possibilities, especially in certain fields. A rejection letter from a journal is not necessarily a bad experience, and is bound to be a positive one if there’s indication that your work was read carefully.

6. Be ready both to accept criticism as well as politely to point out that you stand by what you originally wrote. Make sure you understand there’s a dialectic going on between the two possibilities, and that this dialectic provides you with some room to operate, argue, and change your text. Learning how to write is, quite simply, learning how to rewrite. It is important to hold as a premise – until there’s indication to the contrary – that your work is being read in good faith. Resubmitting work all the time is part of what you will have to do. That will often be enriching, and sometimes a bit mechanical and uninteresting. But it will need to be done.

7. In our field you can build your career writing in Spanish or English (if you also write in Portuguese this is true in a different way). I am of the opinion that you should start by publishing in the language you’re most comfortable with, regardless of what you had to do to fulfill your doctoral requirements. You can always widen your linguistic horizons later.

8. As time pressures build, try to cultivate the ability to convert a piece from one genre into another (an unpublished research article into a conference paper, for example). This will save you time, and will help you handle less things at any given moment of your development. As you do this, you get a hold on the differences between genres – e.g. the fact that the dry and reflexive prose of a research article would probably bore a conference audience to death, if simply read aloud to them sin más. Understand the differences between oral presentations and written scholarship, the differences between the readership of various journals, etc.

9. Understand that just as you expect the journal referees to devote time to reading your piece carefully, it is your responsibility to do the best you can in advance. There are strong demands on their/our time, and if someone has to correct your spelling, your bibliographical notation, and the format of your quotes I bet they/we will be less inclined to be generous with your work. Take care of all of that in advance.

10. Understand you will often have to reread yourself more times than you’d like to. Writing takes work and time, and is more than "expressing what you think" on the page. "What you think" has probably been thought before, at least in some other form, and it’s your responsibility to come to terms with the anteriority of that other thinking. Thinking is thinking the already thought (Heidegger).

(heavily concentrated on the fields of Latin American literature and culture, plus some journals in literature and critical theory in general)