Turning essays into journal articles

There is a massively underused number of potential journal articles resting on teachers’ hard disks, cloud storage and flash drives.

This is how I sorted out my dissertation and took some best bits from other assignments for articles.

If you are interested in doing it, this might be useful. It’s how I did it and no indication of good practice.

  1. Open Word file and save as something else. Probably in a ‘working on’ file.
  2. Go through the dissertation. You need it to be between 3000-7500 words including references.
  3. You will keep much of the literature review unless you have a long lit review or a literature review of several parts. What is essential. Feel free to come back this later.
  4. Discussion and evaluation. Cut the fat. If you are doing half the dissertation this means only the pertinent bits. The evaluation only needs your caveats, probably.
  5. Results. Maybe you just need to give the results, maybe you need a minimum explanation.
  6. Methodology. Keep the what and unless you did something crazy and new, discard most of the why. How should be bare bones.
  7. OMG. Still over. Check refs. Do your quotes need to be full quotes?
  8. Damn. Sacrifice your favourite bit that is a bit odd. Is it coherent?
  9. Finished? No. You have to strip the metadata in preparation for a double blind.
  10. Set aside at least two hours to submit.
  11. Rest for 3-9 months. Seriously.
  1. Go through the dissertation. You need it to be between 3000-7500 words including references.
  2. You will keep much of the literature review unless you have a long lit review or a literature review of several parts. What is essential. Feel free to come back this later.
  3. Discussion and evaluation. Cut the fat. If you are doing half the dissertation this means only the pertinent bits. The evaluation only needs your caveats, probably.
  4. Results. Maybe you just need to give the results, maybe you need a minimum explanation.
  5. Methodology. Keep the what and unless you did something crazy and new, discard most of the why. How should be bare bones.
  6. OMG. Still over. Check refs. Do your quotes need to be full quotes?
  7. Damn. Sacrifice your favourite bit that is a bit odd. Is it coherent?
  8. Finished? No. You have to strip the metadata in preparation for a double blind.
  9. Set aside at least two hours to submit.
  10. Rest for 3-9 months. Seriously.
This is just my experience. I used part of the Applied Linguistics module, my DipTESOL independent research project, a corpora essay and half my dissertation.

Good luck!