Writing Focus – Publishing and Reflecting

Publishing

Publishing is not just for best-selling authors or journalists working for news media. Anyone who produces a finished piece and shares it with a wider audience is a published author. You probably have already published work of your own prior to this research paper. Have you ever considered yourself a published writer? What does publishing mean exactly? View this presentation for a brief overview of publishing along with some general guidelines regarding the technical aspects of your research paper. Click the player button to begin.

View a printable version of the interactivity.

 

Options for Publishing Your Paper

In addition to submitting your final paper to your instructor, consider publishing your Below are suggestions for publishing your paper:

• If you wish to pursue professional publication, conduct a web search of publishers, magazines, or trade journals that might be interested in accepting your paper for publication. Be wary of any professional site that may want you to send money to publish your paper.
  
• Post your work on a blog for others to read and offer comments.
  
• Conduct a web search of local, state, and national organizations that sponsor essay contests and enter your writing in the contest.
  
• Submit your paper in a letter or opinion column format to the editor of a local or national newspaper.
  
• Submit your paper to your school newspaper, yearbook, or literary magazine if your topic appeals to other students.
  
• Share your information with a public official or business company.
  
• Make a recording of your paper in the format of a persuasive speech and publish it to the discussion board for the peers in your class to hear and review.
  
• Discuss another idea for publishing with your instructor.
  

Reflecting

Although reflecting is the final step of the writing process, it is probably the most important when it comes to developing your skills as a writer. One reason that reflecting is so important to learning is that it is a form of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. It is possible to learn new tasks without much thinking, such as relying on muscle memory for repetitive physical movements. But a higher level of thinking takes deliberate reflection on learning. In other words, you need to purposefully think about learning in order to learn lessons that you can apply in the future. In this interactivity, take a moment to review some questions that you can ask yourself during the reflecting step of the writing process. Click the player button to begin.

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Publishing and Reflecting Review

Now that you have explored the publishing and reflecting steps of the writing process, it is time to review your knowledge and practice what you have learned. In this non-graded activity, read the statements and decide whether they are true or false. Click the player button to get started.