Using Models and Templates to Expand Your Scholarly Repertoire

Probably one of the most common pieces of writing advice is to read. Read everything you can get your hands on, so you get a feel for the cadence of language, for the way expert writers build sentences, paragraphs, arguments, and so on. Reading widely can undoubtedly develop your ear for language. Still, academic writers will also want to read specifically and deeply in their fields and the genres in which they expect to publish. This will be especially important for individuals who are just starting to find their voice as writers, but it is also good advice for established writers who are broadening the scope of their scholarship and writing in another discipline or genre for the first time.

In this blog post, I describe strategies for adopting critical reading strategies that help you identify models and templates to improve your scholarly writing.

Becoming a Critical Reader

A first step in identifying models is to consider each piece of scholarly writing you encounter as a potential model. If you keep a journal or a commonplace book, you might jot down the cite for articles that you find particularly compelling to come back to them later. Alternately, spend some time copying passages or recreating organizational structures that work well. If you have a particular project that you might like to adapt the model to, note that. Because we often learn as much from other people’s successes as when they fall short, you may also want to identify pieces that don’t work as well as they should. In reflecting on these texts, ask yourself the following questions:

• What made the writing compelling?

• What did the author(s) do to make their meaning accessible to me as a reader?

• What strategies did they use to frame their argument successfully?

• How did the writing fail to engage me?

• How might the writer(s) have framed the argument more successfully? What pieces seemed to be missing?

• What did the author(s) do that bored, confused, or frustrated me as a reader?

As you respond to these questions, try to separate the piece’s content from how it is written. The goal is to understand how writers build a manuscript at the word, sentence, paragraph, and manuscript level.

Analyzing a Text

At other times, you may need to do a deeper dive into a specific publication type. For example, before starting your dissertation, you will want to look at several recent dissertations from your program to see how they were structured. If you plan to develop a journal manuscript, you will want to spend some time looking at several recent articles from your target publication(s). Finally, suppose you plan to write in a new genre (a policy paper instead of empirical research). In that case, you may want to look at how those manuscripts are structured across several journals in your discipline and your target publication. So here are some specific considerations for analyzing a potential model, along with some questions you might ask:

• Genre. Journals publish a range of different types of scholarship, including empirical research, literature reviews, theory pieces, policy or position papers, and book reviews, to name a few. Each of these is likely to have a distinct structure and organization—some of which will be established by the target publication and some driven by reader and field expectations. What is a typical outline for the type of manuscript you plan to write?

• Length. Most publications will set a maximum word or page limit for submissions, but it is also helpful to get a sense of how much space to devote to the individual sections of the manuscript. Though your content will ultimately determine the length of specific sections, having a rough idea of how much space authors typically devote to describing the method, for example, may be helpful. If your manuscript is well over the word count, those guidelines offer some insight into where you can cut before submission. Alternately, if your manuscript is well below the target word count and you notice that your discussion section is much shorter than most of those published in that journal, this may be an indication that you need to develop this section a bit more.

• Organization. Most academic manuscripts follow fairly common organizational structures. What sections typically appear in manuscripts of this type? In which order do they occur? How do people label those sections? What do the sections usually contain? If people deviate from these more typical structures, when and how do they do it?

• Data displays. For empirical manuscripts, journals may limit the number and kind of data displays they will publish. In addition to reviewing the specific guidelines, it’s helpful to attend to how tables and figures show up in the target publication? Where do the tables and figures typically appear? How many do authors include on average? How much commentary accompanies the data displays?

• Citation. Authors need to attend to citation conventions at a couple of different levels. At the most basic level are considerations related to the style of target publication (e.g., APA, CMOS, MLA). But the nature of the piece might also change the way we reference other authors and their work. For example, public scholarship may take on a more journalistic tone, and references may be integrated less formally than in a traditional scholarly outlet.

Working at the Section Level

If a particular section typically gives you trouble, you may choose to look at models only for that part of the text. For me, conclusions are especially challenging, so I might spend some time analyzing those. The theoretical framework is another section that might create problems for some writers. In late March, I released a mini-course on writing a theoretical framework. As part of that course development, I analyzed about two dozen articles to see whether they had a theoretical framework, what it was called, where it was located, and how long it was. So here are some takeaways I can use the next time I write a manuscript containing a theoretical framework:

• The average word count was about 450 words (or 1 ½ to 2 manuscript pages). That word count represented about 7% of the total word count for the articles I examined.

• Authors called the section different things, but theoretical framework was most common. And they usually embedded the framework in the introductory part of the journal manuscript, though it sometimes followed, preceded, or took the place of the literature review.

• Across all these manuscripts, theoretical frameworks guided the choice of variables, measures, and instruments; provided a lens or structure for data analysis; offered a context or rationale for the study; or served as a model for hypothesis testing or theory building. Of course, my theoretical framework won’t do all of these things. Still, this type of analysis provides me with a broad understanding of how theory might inform a study and how I might communicate that in a manuscript.

You can do a similar analysis for any part of a manuscript you need to understand better.

Working at the Word Level

Finally, some writers may need help at the sentence level, especially if they are just beginning to develop their academic writing vocabulary. More experienced writers may want to find ways to vary their word choice and sentence structure. Using sentence starters or templates can be especially helpful in both cases. The Academic Phrasebank at the University of Manchester has an abundance of templates to support a wide range of scholarly writing projects. The phrasebank has sections focused on writing introductions, developing the literature review, describing methods, reporting results, and discussing findings. Each section provides a series of expandable boxes representing different use cases, and embedded within each box are a dozen or more sentence templates. For example, under the literature review section, users can find templates for describing the methodological approaches of previous literature, referencing another writer’s idea or position, introducing a quote, or summarizing a section of the review—just to name a few.

So, you may ask whether “modeling” your work on someone else’s will be seen as derivative at best and plagiaristic at worst. The short answer is NO, especially if you focus on the structure and organization rather than the model’s content. In Write More, Publish More, Stress Less!, Dannelle Stevens describes the use of models as a three-step process involving detective work, reflective work, and expressive work. First, in detective work, you identify and analyze models. Then, once you have a good idea of how texts work within a particular genre, journal, or book series, you can apply what you have learned to your own project (i.e., reflective work). That is, how should I organize or structure my manuscript to fit the requirements of this genre or satisfy the readers of this publication? Finally, expressive work takes you even further away from the original model, as you must balance genre and reader expectations with the content of your work and the purposes for writing.

Identifying and evaluating models for scholarly projects can be an essential strategy for expanding your repertoire as a writer. Learning to emulate the genres in your field successfully can also increase your likelihood of getting published.