Scholarly Publication and Posters

Most often the phrase scholarly writing is used to refer to reports of original research in journals. It may also, however, be used in reference to other kinds of writing such as review articles (which summarize and synthesize previous research), annotated bibliographies (which aid others in performing research), abstracts (which summarize experiments or studies), and grant proposals (which seek funding for research). In any case, the point of scholarly writing is communication by a scholar or researcher with an audience of peers. Since the purpose is communication and not entertainment, scientific writing should be precise, clear and objective.

There are two major differences between writing for publication and writing for a class: audience and purpose.

Audience:

Your audience (or readers) when you write for publication is much larger. Anyone who reads the publication is in your audience, so you will want to think about:

• who they are
• what they already know
• how your writing contributes to their understanding of the topic / field

Depending on where you publish, your audience could be very big (e.g., if you publish in a major newspaper or magazine) and / or have varying degrees of previous knowledge about the topic.

The audience for a scholarly publication will likely already know a good deal about your topic, whereas the audience in a popular / news publication may or may not already know a lot about it.

You will want to carefully consider your piece's audience as you write it. This will influence your tone, your vocabulary, length of your piece, level of depth, etc, so it is critically important.

Purpose:

Purpose and Audience are related -- who you are writing for will influence what you want the audience to do / think / feel after reading.

Think carefully about why you are writing. Some questions to ask:

• What genre am I writing in? (You will write differently if you are writing an editorial vs. a scholarly paper, or a book chapter vs. a poem)
• Who needs to read this in order to understand this topic?
• What do I hope they will do / think / feel after reading?
• What do they already know and what do I need to explain?
• What level of knowledge does my audience already have?
• What are their goals / hopes / objectives in reading this and how can I best leverage this in my writing?

 Guide content adapted from a guide from UC Merced, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.