Revise with Me: Writing an Argument-Based Article
Are you working on revising writing for publication? Hey, so am I! And I’m writing a blog series on the revision process. In between my freelance editing work, I’ll be turning a dissertation chapter into an article, and I’ll write about the joys and challenges of writing and editing as well as any tips and strategies I employ (successfully or not) along the way.
This week I continued to work on my article’s argument, guided by Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. Specifically, I was working with pages 86-87 of the second edition. I found her ideas helpful to get some distance from my own writing. I’m going to need to cut the word count down considerably, so getting some clarity on what needs to stay to support my article’s argument seemed like a good place to start.
Common pitfall: no argument
Articles can get rejected for all kinds of reasons which may or may not have anything to do with the quality of the writing. However, Belcher lays it out quite clearly: “The main reason why editors and reviewers reject articles is because their authors either do not have an argument or do not state it properly” (66). Every writer has been through stages where their argument is either flimsy, inconsistent, non-existent, or buried in the middle or end of the article. That’s what drafting and feedback is for!
If, as many teachers have told me, writing is thinking, sometimes it takes me a while to think and write through to the point where I finally encounter my argument. Then, because ideas are complicated and messy, I have a lot of trouble letting go of the entire prior thought process that led to my argument, for fear of losing the reader, or losing the thread myself.
In my particular case, I am revising the third chapter of my dissertation. That means that I have to let go of two chapters’ worth of thought process (!) that led me to the third chapter. I have to accept that I can introduce the reader to my argument early in my article, and I don’t have to lead them down the long, winding path that it took for me to get there myself. When I look at it that way, it makes sense: as a reader of an academic journal article, I don’t want to take the scenic route to the argument. Now the challenge is to look at my writing in such a way that I can present my ideas in the order that they best support my argument instead of retracing exactly the steps that led me there.
Evidence-based vs. argument-based
Belcher makes an important distinction between evidence-based and argument-based writing that I felt accurately described the attachment I mentioned above to writing out my thought process. An evidence-based article presents information like a detective collecting evidence. The detective doesn’t know exactly where they’re going, they’re just following a path according to evidence. An argument-based article is more like a lawyer arguing a case: they lead with the argument, present the facts, and cross-examine contradictory evidence. Belcher credits Tim Stowell with the detective/lawyer analogy, which is helpfully unpacked on page 80.
This made a lot of sense to me. My written-out thought process was that of the detective, uncovering pieces of evidence so that the reader could arrive with me at the argument. This may also explain why I have such trouble changing the order of my ideas once they are in place, because disrupting that order disrupts my careful presentation of clues. I tend to build my transitions so deeply into each paragraph that it becomes difficult to move ideas around without violently uprooting my beloved transitions. Instead, I have to break free of that and get enough distance to make sure that the presentation and cross-examination of ideas is all done in service of my argument.
Revising for an argument-based article
After my previous argument-refining work, I had an argument to work with, and I kept it handy as I worked. (That argument may not be in its final version, either, but at least I had something to work with as I start to cut pieces and reorganize the article body.)
Belcher recommends printing out the article and reading it through while thinking about a few different things. As you read, you highlight places where your argument appears. That way you have a very visual representation of how often you’ve connected your evidence back to your argument. I had to be very careful that I only highlighted places where I was explicitly connecting evidence back to my argument, instead of accidentally highlighting places where important evidence was presented but not yet connected to my argument.
After highlighting where the argument appears, Belcher recommends a few steps (pp. 86-87):
Check that the main point of each paragraph is at the start and not the end of the paragraph.
Check that your argument is stated early and clearly in the article—within at least the first 3 pages, preferably sooner.
Refine the introduction.
Reorganize the body.
Refine the conclusion.
This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of diving into revisions, and my initial reaction was that the step “reorganize the body” is going to take some real time! I’m trying to resist that trepidation, though—if I break it down into smaller goals, that writing task isn’t going to be so daunting. I am a serial outliner—someone who thinks, correctly or not, that outlining is going to get me unstuck—so my likely next step is to look at where I highlighted and think about how I could reorganize those sections like a lawyer instead of a detective. It will probably involve a scribbled bullet point outline on a piece of scrap paper that will later morph into a scribbled bullet point outline in a notebook, and so on until I jump into the document and start moving things around. After that, I can go through and think about how soon I present my argument, and how to tweak (or rewrite) the intro and conclusion, and how to restore my beloved transitions.
If it sounds intimidating to dive into writing like this…
It is and it isn’t. If I make a change I later come to regret, I have the original text saved, and I can always revert back. The goal is to play around with what I have to make it a better piece of writing, more suited to being an article in a journal instead of a chapter in a dissertation.
The fact that this is my own writing and not someone else’s adds an extra layer of challenge to this process, and it is why I am so motivated to distance myself from the text in order to make it better. When I do this kind of work as an editor, I take into account what exactly the client wants me to do, and I make suggestions about other possible improvements to make. It’s a lot easier to build a logical argument when the ideas are someone else’s. Although I’m benefitting here from Belcher’s guidelines, they may not be exactly right for everyone’s writing. Not everything needs to follow the same structure, and this is not a system I apply universally in my editing work. We’re all learning things here and there and applying them when they’re needed, and that’s the beauty of human writers and human editors. Get in touch with this human editor here or on my contact page. Subscribe below if you’d like to stay updated on this revision adventure. Until next time!
