Graduate Writing center

1. Title

Create a compelling title. Your title is your first (and possibly only) opportunity to attract a reader’s attention. A good title should be concise, accurate, and informative. It should tell the reader exactly what the article is about. It should also help make your article more detectable. It’s also important to try to make your title understandable to readers from outside your field and avoid abbreviations, formulae, and numbers. For example:

Chadwick, Adrian M. 2012, “Routine Magic, Mundane Ritual: Towards a Unified Notion of Depositional Practice,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 283–315.

2. Keywords

Keywords are an essential part of producing a journal article; when writing a journal article you must select keywords that you would like your article to rank for. Keywords help potential readers to discover your article when conducting research using search engines.

3. Abstract

In your abstract you are expected to clearly and concisely express the key points of your research. An abstract must always be well considered, as it is the primary element of your work that readers will come across. An abstract should be a short paragraph (around 250-300 words) that summarizes the findings of your journal article. Ordinarily an abstract will be comprised of a) What your research is about, b) What methods have been used, c) What your main findings are.

4. Introduction

An introduction is a pivotal part of the article writing process. An introduction not only introduces your topic and your stance on the topic, but it also contextualizes your argument in the broader academic field.

• Writing a good introduction with a clear thesis statement   Pretty much all major journals in Arts and Humanities (and in Social Sciences as well) request and ask for a clearly defined thesis for the submitted article. It is crucial to have a clear and well-articulated thesis. Moreover, it is also important to draft a good thesis because the quality of your writing would depend upon the clarity of your thesis.
    In the beginning of your article, briefly introduce the text or topic that your are writing about. Usually, this introduction is one compact paragraph and includes the main thesis of your article. For example:
  Despite its noteworthy revisionist and sympathetic approach, Terrence Malick’s critically acclaimed 2006 film, The New World, exemplifies how the trope of the “Indian Princess” has persisted into contemporary American cinema. Therefore, the subsequent sections of this paper examine how The New World appropriates and variates the Pocahontas narrative in terms of the contested colonial history of America(s) and filmic devices.
• Explaining your theory that you are applying   Make sure to cite and explain the particular theory that you are using. It is important to explain as to which particular “understanding” of a theory or a concept are you using, so that your readers know that you are applying a specific understanding of the theorist or theory. Furthermore, this brief explanation also kind of let the reader figure out how to read your article clearly. Here is an example of this practice:
  In The Sun Also Rises Jake can be viewed as embodying the Signifier/phallus and Cohn as signified/penis. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the phallus in the symbolic stage references what the physical penis signifies. The phallus is used to emphasize the role that the penis plays in fantasy. That is to say, the phallus represents the imaginary and symbolic function of the penis, and this refers to the authority of the phallus through which one can recognize sexual difference and lack. Therefore, in Lacanian penis/phallus relation, the signifier equals penis, and the signified is phallus. Neither a fantasy, nor an object, nor an organ, the phallus is “the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier” (Lacan Écrits 275).
    This is an example of how to introduce your theory and then explain its specific usage in your argument. Present a reason why it is necessary to read and understand the text you are writing about. Why does it matter for you to write it and for the reader to read it?
• Providing the Literature Review (an Account of Previous Work on the Text/Topic)   Literature reviews aren’t always required, but often form an important part of Humanities and Social Sciences manuscripts. Typically, you would expect a literature review to a) discuss what’s already known about the topic of the article, b) identify gaps in current knowledge, c) present your approach to addressing those gaps.
    This is where you will discuss the articles that you had researched during the early stages of your publication plan.

5. Main Body

  The main body is where you present, in appropriate detail, your main arguments, themes and contentions, all thoroughly grounded in evidence, close analysis and clear, compelling writing.

  The paragraph is an article’s main organizing principle. Each paragraph should contain one main theme and be of at least four or five sentences, and a logical flow should exist between and among your paragraphs. Humanities articles will often not use the more obvious subheadings common to the social sciences, such as ‘Data Collection’, ‘Analysis’ or ‘Results’. While humanities articles are less subject to these subheading conventions, the effective use of subheadings can clarify and identify your ideas and enable readers to navigate easily through the text (Soule, Whiteley and McIntosh 2007, p. 19). It is still useful to use transitions and opening sentences to indicate what each paragraph’s main theme is, and how it fits into the overarching theme of your article.

  By focusing on one main original idea or contention in your article and making explicit statements about your article’s contribution to the existing scholarship, you will grab the attention of journal publishers, and hopefully peer reviewers and subsequent readers. If you have information that is not directly related to your main argument but is still important, use footnotes or endnotes (depending on the journal’s own style). Use direct quotations strategically and judiciously and translate foreign-language quotations if your article is written for an English-language journal.

6. Conclusion

Your conclusion should be an interpretation of your results, where you summarise all of the concepts that you introduced in the main body of the text in order of most to least important. No new concepts are to be introduced in this section.

7. References and Citations

References and Citations should be well balanced, current and relevant. The studies you cite should be strongly related to your research question. Each journal will use a specific referencing style—either one of the main styles in common use (APA, Chicago, MLA) or a modified version of their own. For example, you can refer to the following link for APA style: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_the_basics.html