Ambermoon24 Posted May 27, 2015 Posted May 27, 2015 Hello Everyone, So I'll be heading off to my MA program in composition and rhetoric in August, but I'm also not wanting to waste precious time in the summer. Over the past month since I've graduated undergrad and been at home, I've been pursuing some independent creative writing projects. I've set a goal to have enough poems finished for a small collection and I have a novel outlined. I believe the poetry collection is a reasonable goal. But I'm also wondering if I should use this time to revise some of my stronger papers from undergrad for journal publications. One of my professors from my undergrad institution recommended I use the summer to expand my papers into articles. I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on when it's an appropriate time to start sending out work for publications. Also, since my undergrad degree was in literature, none of my papers discuss comp/rhet topics. Should I consider reworking these papers to be more comp/rhet focused, or should I revise them and send them off to literary journals? I might be overthinking this, but I wouldn't want any literature publications to somehow indicate I'm not dedicated to my work in comp/rhet. I've had experience writing abstracts and longer papers. My senior honors thesis was about 46 pages, and I've done work with a faculty member for a research scholarship, so I'm used to revising and expanding shorter papers. Any thoughts about developing a publication strategy? Thanks for reading!
ComeBackZinc Posted May 27, 2015 Posted May 27, 2015 My advice: 1. Use this summer to explore your creative writing work (which, FWIW, many people in rhet/comp are into), because you won't have much time at all to do such things once you've started and you want to give yourself mental space to rest and do your own stuff for now. Nobody expects an MA student to be getting published, let alone someone who's not yet started their MA. Of course publication is important, but if your work is good it will be good in the summer after your first MA year, which is a fine time to start drafting articles. 2. I would not try to rework a lit paper into a rhet/comp article; papers like that tend to read like, well, lit papers reworked into rhet/comp articles, which rhet/comp journals get a lot of and tend not to be very enthusiastic about. If these papers are worth publishing, try publishing them in lit journals. No, a lit article won't be as valuable on the job market as a rhet/comp article, but a pub's a pub, and it's a more fruitful use of your time to tighten up a paper into its best form than to try and Frankenstein it into something it wasn't intended to be. Just my 2 cents. Dr. Old Bill 1
rising_star Posted May 27, 2015 Posted May 27, 2015 Hi Ambermoon24, In general, we don't allow duplicate postings. I'm locking this thread. Those who want to reply, go here:
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