Written by Sirous Fozouni
Bloggers, freelance writers, copywriters, and other content creators are often faced with a seemingly impossible task: producing a great article under a tight deadline. That's why it's important to develop writing skills that can help you create great content in a short amount of time.
How to Write a Good Article
First of all, there's no such a thing as 'a good paper.' This is because a good article is defined not just by its content, but more specifically by a writing approach geared towards publication. The number one secret is: you have to produce a specific piece for a specific journal. There is no 'generic' good article that could fit in any journal.
Before you start writing, then, the most important task is to choose a journal.
You have the research that you have been working on for several years.
Setting, data, conclusions, etc. will be the same in almost every paper you are going to produce. But where to publish will define what to publish and how you publish your research.
Let me insist on one point: a good article is always good for a certain journal. As a result, you should read the journal you have in mind and observe its main features.
Successful authors are the best readers, so in order to win in the 'publish or perish' game, you must begin by reading potential journals. In order to determine different strategies for different publications, I would like to emphasize three key features you should consider when preparing your paper.
First, check the geographical or idiomatic scope of the chosen journal and decide if it is national, regional, or international.
In some cases, the geographical scope appears in the journal's title, when they explicitly refer to European, South Asian, Latin American, or African studies. But in many cases, the journal name does not inform and can even be misleading: almost every country has a national journal called 'Sociology,' 'Sociologies' or 'Sociological Studies,' and though you would think that such journals would be open, most are in fact run by national associations which are focused mainly on developing local debates. Next, go to the aims and scope of the journal, and discover what the editors are interested in publishing.
Second, pay attention to the journal scope. There are generalist journals like Current Sociology, which publishes a wide variety of sociology-related issues. Or they can be specialized, limiting their contents to certain areas, subfields, theoretical discussions, or even geographical contexts. For generalist journals, you should keep your articles more open and jargon-free than you would for a specialized one.
For instance, Current Sociology is a generalist journal with a very international readership.
Contextualization is thus fundamental to make your case understandable for a reader who is not familiar with the social reality you are describing.
Finding a common ground for discussion in the literature review will help to create bridges to this global audience and make your topic relevant to them.
What would a reader from the other side of the world learn from my paper? Authors from the core countries and, in many cases, scholars from the peripheral ones often forget to ask this question.
In either case, if it goes unanswered, the relevance of your work can be reduced. On the one hand, the scholars from hegemonic academies assume that everything they do is relevant since they are core.' Thus a descriptive article on a survey with 500 cases in Central Europe or the US should be enough to get published.
On the other hand, on the periphery, the lack of publications about a certain country or the simple application of a concept to analyze a remote case is deemed original enough. Both of these assumptions are wrong: as I will show below, mainstream, interesting, or curious does not necessarily develop into something relevant to the readers.
Last but not least: the paper's format. We can find two main styles in academic journals. The IMRaD style is the one most textbooks on scientific writing teach, and it has become the hegemonic model for scholarly publication. IMRaD is the only style used in the hard sciences, having been used since the 1950s in physics and in biomedicine since the 1980s. IMRaD articles are structured as introduction, methods, results, and discussion
the idea behind this structure is to better organize the idea and to consolidate the theoretical arguments that need a more flexible relationship between methods, results, and discussion. In the social sciences, this model is more common in US journals and is better suited for descriptive papers and quantitative analysis.
On the other hand, narrative articles are most common in Europe and in regions with a higher European influence in their academic culture.
Narrative articles are more suited for qualitative analysis and for developing theoretical/conceptual discussions. Even though Current Sociology does publish some IMRaD papers, the journal privileges
theoretical discussions, so you would find that most of our articles have a narrative form.
Basically, because this format is more flexible, it is better adapted to the argument and helps to build it.
The narrative style is based on the so-called IBC model: introduction, body, and conclusion.
In order to have a well-balanced article, I suggest you keep the introduction to around 15% and the conclusion to a maximum of 10% of the entire paper.
The main body of your article would take up the rest of the space, and ideally should be divided into chapters or sections that help you build the argument and help the reader follow the flow of your ideas.
