“As with most things academic, the various steps involved in publishing an essay need to be learned; there is nothing obvious about any of them” (206-207).

– Gregory Colón Semenza, Graduate Study for the 21st Century

Revising an existing piece of writing for publication in a peer-reviewed journal or edited collection can be a challenging process because it requires a careful rethinking of the scope and structure of the argument. For instance, revising a seminar paper or conference paper for publication typically means expanding the original argument while revising a dissertation chapter often means condensing it.

Below we review some of the key steps involved in revising for publication.

Identifying a Target Publication

Having a clearer sense of your purpose and audience can help you make strategic choices about how to revise, and identifying a target publication is a great starting point. In fact, in his guide for graduate study, Gregory Colón Semenza recommends constructing a list of the top five journals in your field that you hope to publish in, and suggests doing this early in your program (207). Aim for quality over quantity; publishing one article in the major journal in your field can carry more weight than publishing several articles in less prestigious journals.

Here are some places to start:

Talk to your advisors and faculty. Ask them what the major journals in the field are and then learn more about the journals by visiting their websites or looking in databases like the MLA Directory of Periodicals.
Talk to your peers. Where have they published? What was the experience like?
Review your bibliography. Where are the sources that you’re citing published?

When you have a list of possible journals, do some research to learn about their guidelines and timeline. What is the word count and how does that compare to the piece you intend to revise? How long do they typically take to respond to manuscripts? How does that timeline align with your own goals? For instance, if you’re going to be on the job market in 6 months, you might want to look for a journal that responds to manuscripts more quickly.

Once you’ve selected a journal, review the tables of contents from the past three issues. Choose a few articles and read them as models, paying particular attention to how they’re structured. How long are the introductions? Where do the authors articulate their argument? How many sources do they cite? Take notes as you read to capture the key features you notice in each article. Use reverse outlining as a strategy to understand structure. When you’re done, do some freewriting to synthesize what you learned and to consider how that information might guide your revision work. Learn the basics of these strategies by reviewing the definitions in our Glossary (opens in new tab).

For more tips on this part of the process, see The Office of Career Planning & Professional Developments’s “The Path to Publication, Part 1: Selecting a Journal” (opens in new tab).

Rethinking your Argument

Write an Abstract to Clarify Your Argument

One of the most common issues that writers face when revising for publication is that they do not introduce their argument early and clearly enough. Remember that readers expect a peer-reviewed article to make an intervention in the field, which means that you need to foreground that intervention in the first few pages. In her guide to successfully publishing an article, Wendy Laura Belcher emphasizes this key point:

A publishable article is organized around a single significant new idea that is demonstrably related to what has come before. If your idea is interesting but not new, your article will not be published. If your idea is new but not related to the old (usually previous research), your article will not be published. If your ideas are new but disconnected from each other, your article will not be published. (49)

A good starting point for clarifying your argument is to write an abstract for the article, a task that requires you to clearly and concisely articulate “what has come before” and your “single significant new idea,” or intervention, in 200-300 words. Ask yourself these two key questions:

How are scholars talking about the issue that I intend to address in my article? In other words, what has come before? What status quo ideas might readers have about the issue at hand?
How will you destabilize those status quo ideas to intervene in the current scholarly conversation? Put another way, what is your single significant new idea and what gap does it fill in existing research?

Below are a few examples of abstracts for peer-reviewed articles published by CUNY Graduate Center faculty across several disciplines to help you understand how other writers set up their interventions for readers in this particular genre. We’ve included the full abstract followed by a color-coded version that highlights the status quo in yellow, the destabilizer in green, and the intervention in blue.

From Alexander A. Bauer, “Itinerant Objects,” Annual Review of Anthropology 48 (2019): 335-352.

That the meanings and value of things can be transformed through their circulation was brought to the foreground of anthropological studies more than 30 years ago with the publication of The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986b). The last decade, however, has seen a move away from “object biographies” in favor of frameworks that better account for objects’ complex entanglements. Recent work on object itineraries extends and challenges many elements of the biography approach and represents an intersection with critical interventions regarding materiality and agency, networks and circulation, and heritage discourses. This review evaluates the legacy of The Social Life of Things in the context of anthropological studies of the material world and suggests that thinking about itineraries rather than biographies allows us to collapse the distinctions between past and present (and future) and, thus, fully consider objects’ present entanglements as central to their story.

From Talia Schaffer, “Care Communities: Ethics, Fictions, Temporalities,” South Atlantic Quarterly 118, no. 3 (July 2019): 521-542.

The feminist philosophy of “ethics of care” has been important for disability studies inasmuch as it helps us see caregiving as widespread and admirable, rather than as a failure of autonomy. Care ethicists usually imagine care as either an institutional situation or an intimate dyad. However, in “Critical Care,” I add a third case in a midrange scale: the care community. The care community is a voluntary social formation, composed of friends, family, and neighbors, that coalesces around someone in need. It is my contention that by exploring the care community, we can make important aspects of care visible and rethink care relationships. What we see in care communities is a process, rather than a preset care structure, and that fluidity allows us to interrogate the conditions under which care can develop and the dynamics of extended care. I use Victorian fiction to showcase care communities, since novels of this period are marked by ubiquitous spontaneous small groups forming around people who are ill or hurt, but I also make a case that care communities continue to exist today, particularly among queer communities and people of color, performing a vital function in our ordinary lives. Finally, I argue that care communities can help us fundamentally rethink disability as a need like any other need rather than an inherent identity. Eva Feder Kittay has argued that care relations are the foundation of civic society; in that case, disability and the care community that arises in response to it are not marginalized cases but are what, profoundly, makes social life possible.

From Eva Pastalkova, Vladimir Itskov, Asohan Amarasingham, and György Buzsáki. “Internally Generated Cell Assembly Sequences in the Rat Hippocampus,” Science 321, no. 5894 (2008): 1322-1327.

A long-standing conjecture in neuroscience is that aspects of cognition depend on the brain’s ability to self-generate sequential neuronal activity. We found that reliably and continually changing cell assemblies in the rat hippocampus appeared not only during spatial navigation but also in the absence of changing environmental or body-derived inputs. During the delay period of a memory task, each moment in time was characterized by the activity of a particular assembly of neurons. Identical initial conditions triggered a similar assembly sequence, whereas different conditions gave rise to different sequences, thereby predicting behavioral choices, including errors. Such sequences were not formed in control (nonmemory) tasks. We hypothesize that neuronal representations, evolved for encoding distance in spatial navigation, also support episodic recall and the planning of action sequences.

In addition to writing your abstract, it can also be helpful to reread the model texts you selected from your target publication and highlight these same elements the first time they appear in the article. Where are the writers establishing the existing conversation and articulating their interventions? What page is that happening on? That’s where you want to position your own intervention when you revise.

Review Feedback to Understand Reader’s Expectations

After you have a clearer sense of the argument that you want to make, you’ll want to review any feedback that you received on the original piece – comments from advisors, faculty, conference attendees, peers, etc. – and then use that information to determine what readers might expect that you’re not yet doing in the current draft. For instance, if the comments reveal that people are misunderstanding the argument, you’ll want to consider how to address the gap between your intentions and their understanding. There are a lot of different ways to approach this kind of revision work, but the following exercises from our Revision Strategies website (opens in new tab) guide might be a good place to start: “Unsure of Reader Objections to Your Work? Strengthen Your Argument by Playing Devil’s Advocate” (opens in new tab), “Does Your Evidence Say What You Think it Does? Analyzing Quote Sandwiches to Identify Logical Gaps” (opens in new tab), “What Are You Not (Not) Saying? Defining Your Argument Positively Instead of Negatively” (opens in new tab) and “Fractured Logic and Unconnected Claims? Argument as a Matter of Hierarchy” (opens in new tab).

Reread, Create a Revision Plan, Revise

Revising an existing piece of writing can be a challenging and frustrating process. You put so much time and energy into the first version that you might not know where to start because all you can see is the finished product that came out of all that work. Reverse outlining is a great place to start because it helps you zoom out to get a more realistic sense of what your piece is currently doing in terms of content and structure. In addition to using the main bullet points to capture the central idea of each paragraph, you might also include sub-bullets that list all of the evidence that you include to support your ideas.

When you’re finished, reread your reverse outline and use the “track changes” or “suggesting” feature to make changes. Do you need to expand the argument? Create new bullets where you want to include new paragraphs and draft topic sentences. Do you need to condense the argument? Strike out any paragraphs that you think you might cut or use the comment feature to make notes regarding how you could condense and combine paragraphs. Use this new outline to guide your revision work.

Strengthening Your Structure

In addition to thinking about content, you will also want to think carefully about structure. First, think about the structure of the article as a whole. What did you notice about the current structure of your piece when you created the reverse outline? Are there paragraphs that readers might need/want sooner that you should reposition earlier in the article version? Are there logical gaps between existing paragraphs that you need to fill when you revise? If you cut paragraphs, do you know how you want to rework the transitions to ensure the new structure is smooth?

The main changes you will want to make in terms of structure will likely be incorporating more signposting and signaling language to help readers navigate your argument. As we explain in our Glossary (opens in new tab), signposting is a term used to indicate “words, phrases, and transitions that guide the reader through a piece of writing, letting them know which claims are most important and where the argument changes focus.” You might use an entire sentence to signpost (e.g. “Having established x, I will now go on to discuss y,” or you might use a word or phrase like “however”, “similarly,” or “on the one hand…on the other hand” to help readers easily see how your ideas are connected. Signaling language, meanwhile, “help readers transition between the ideas presented by the writer and the ideas drawn from their sources, creating a greater sense of continuity and connection between the different voices within a piece of writing.” This kind of language is crucial in establishing your intervention because it tells readers how you are agreeing with, disagreeing with, and qualifying the perspectives of other scholars.

We have a few Revision Strategies that might help you think more concretely about what changes to make. Try looking at: “Does Each Topic Sentence State the Purpose of That Paragraph? Check Topic Sentences for Signaling” (opens in new tab), “Will My Reader Know What’s Important? Mapping and Signposting as Tools to Navigate Between Claims” (opens in new tab), and “Where’s This Section Going? Signposting to Connect Claims” (opens in new tab).

Submitting the Article

You’ve clarified your intervention and situated it within the first few pages. You’ve revised your argument, making intentional choices about what to keep and what to cut based on your target audience. You’ve reconsidered the structure and incorporated signposting and signaling language to help readers easily navigate your claims. It’s time to submit!

Here are a few final things to consider:

Review the submission guidelines on the journal’s website and follow them to the letter.
Keep the cover letter simple and emphasize the significance of your work to the field. Remember that an abstract summarizes your argument while a cover letter makes a case for the value of your argument. Here’s a guide from Taylor & Francis (opens in new tab) that offers more guidance.
If you are one of several authors, agree on an order before you submit your article for consideration. STEM students will also want to consult this guide on ordering author names (opens in new tab).
Review the journal’s timeline and make a note on your calendar. When is the earliest you might hear back from them? We know it’s hard, but try to be patient. Ask advisors or faculty in your field when it’s appropriate to follow up.
Celebrate! Regardless of the outcome, you put a lot of hard work into revising for publication and submitting an article is something to celebrate.

Additional Resources

Batist, Carly, and Daniel Hengel. “Scientific Manuscript Writing Guide,” The Writing Center, http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/8642/files/2021/06/ScienceWritingGuide-digital_final-1.pdf

Belcher, Wendy Laura. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Botwick, Aaron. “The Path to Publication, Part 1: Selecting a Journal,” The Office of Career Planning & Professional Development, September 27, 2018, https://careerplan.commons.gc.cuny.edu/blog/path-to-publication-part-1

Colón Semenza, Gregory. Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. 2nd Edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

“How to Order Author Names and Why That Matters,” Wordvice, August 18, 2022, https://blog.wordvice.com/journal-article-author-order/

“How to Write a Cover Letter for Journal Submission,” Taylor & Francis Author Services, https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-research/making-your-submission/writing-a-journal-article-cover-letter/

Kelsky, Karen. “Publish This, Not That.” The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2015, pp. 103-109.

Revising for Publication