I was in a conversation recently with someone facing one of the dread
tasks of academic writing: turning a conference paper into an
article. There are people who write conference papers that are
basically already articles. Neither of us fit that bill.
My
conference papers are intended to be talks. Informal. Funny.
Carefully paced. They have places where I gesture at an image instead
of describing it, places where a slide does half the argumentative
work, and places where I say something in two sentences because I
know I can explain it with tone of voice, pacing, or whatever I put
up on the screen.
That works perfectly well in a
conference room or on Zoom. It does not, however, make a good
article. The rhythm’s wrong. The vocabulary is too casual. The
argument often relies more on audience connection than carefully
scripted references to an expansive scholarly literature.
And
I think one reason conference-to-article conversion can feel so
horrible is that we often describe the job as “expanding the
conference paper.” For me, that framing is almost instantly
stressful, because really, the skin doesn't fit.
A
conference paper doesn't need to be expanded into an article.
It needs to be translated into one. You need a mechanism for
getting roughly the same intellectual content out, but in a different
language.
So here's my practical step-by-step process.
Guess what? It includes a spreadsheet.
Step 1.
Break the conference paper apart
First, I copy the
conference paper into a spreadsheet. Not paragraph by paragraph.
Smaller than that. I put about one or two sentences into each row of
the first column.
That sounds tedious. It really isn't.
And the point is to stop seeing the conference paper as a sacred
block of prose that somehow has to grow into something twice its
size.
Now it is just a sequence of little ideas.
Next
to each one, I have an empty box to its right. That empty box is
where the article version goes.
Step 2.
Translate, don't polish
Then I start rewriting down
the second column. I am not line-editing the conference paper. I am
asking what each little unit needs to become when the audience can no
longer hear me speak.
Sometimes a
conference-paper sentence survives almost unchanged. Sometimes two
breezy sentences become a full paragraph. Sometimes I discover that a
sentence was only functioning because the slide behind me contained
six pieces of evidence. Sometimes I realize that “as we all know”
is doing an enormous amount of unpaid labor.
This is where
the translation idea helps me.
The question isn't: How do
I make this sentence more article-like?
It's: What work
was this sentence doing in the talk, and what does the article need
in order to do the same work?
Those are different
questions.
It looks like this:
(This is a real example from this spring: my conference-paper prose on the left, and article prose on the right. The point isn’t simply to make the original longer; it’s to ask what the written version needs in order to do the same argumentative work.)
Step 3.
Insert the missing stuff
As I work, I simply insert
blank spreadsheet rows wherever the article needs something the
conference paper didn't: supporting examples, additional evidence,
references to the scholarship, historical context, the important
take-away to round out the argument.
For me, those blank
rows are important psychologically. They turn “THIS PAPER NEEDS SO
MUCH MORE STUFF” into a series of small, local jobs.
I
don't have to solve the article. I have to fill this box. Then the
next one. Then the one after that. Short tasks, not long ones.
Step
4. Don't forget the slides
If the conference
slides contain substantial content, they go into the spreadsheet
too.
This is particularly important for the way I give
papers, because a lot of information can be sitting on the screen
while I am saying very little about it. A chart that was visible for
thirty seconds might become a full paragraph of article prose. An
image may need description, contextualization, citation, and then
actual analysis. A quotation I could simply let an audience read may
need to be introduced and unpacked.
Slides are part of the
conference paper's argument. If I convert only the script, I am
leaving chunks of the original argument behind.
Step 5.
Move back into a document
Eventually the second column
begins to look less like a set of rewrites and more like an article
draft. That's when I leave my beloved spreadsheet and move back into
a regular document.
It may not be pretty, but by this point, it’s a continuity draft. I know what I’m saying, I know where in the article I’ll be saying it, and I’ve started using the voice that belongs to article prose instead of public delivery. It’s a win!
Step 6.
Add the things articles need
Once I have a continuity
draft in place, it’s easy – and fun! – to build out the parts
that belong particularly to article format.
For me, that
usually means a more substantial contextualizing introduction – the
“lit review.” This is an excuse to decide what I want to include
as context, and what not. The theorizing section is also an excuse to
dive back into how I got interested in this problem in the first
place. I limit myself to a maximum of three scholarly days, because
playing around with the literature is the “big idea” part of the
gig, and I could sit there for weeks, if given a chance.
It also means the
conclusion gets bigger. Conference conclusions can sometimes amount
to: “Look! This thing I have just shown you is neat, and here is
why you should care.” Articles have more room for moralizing. I
like the “so what, so what, now what” formulation. So what did we
learn? And then: so what does that change (and for whom)? And
finally: now what? What does this case let us see differently? What
larger conversation does it alter? What becomes possible because
we've followed the evidence this far?
Those questions are
much easier for me to answer once I actually have article prose in
front of me.
Step 7. Normal
edits
After all of that work, the conference
paper is essentially gone. I am editing an article.
That
means the usual work: structure, argument, rhythm, clarity, flow,
repetition, citations, transitions, and all the other things that
make a draft slowly become something somebody else might want to
read. (Taking out the giant shouty “LOOK FOR EX” and actually DO
that work!). But that’s just cleanup!
-
Conference Paper → Article: The Seven Steps - Break the conference paper apart
- Translate, don’t polish
- Insert the missing stuff
- Don’t forget the slides
- >Move back into a document
- Add the things articles need
- Normal edits
Why This Works
for Me
I've used this exact process twice this past
spring. Both conference papers became articles, and both articles
were accepted, hooray! So I'm inclined to think the method has
legs.
I don't imagine everyone needs the spreadsheet. Some
people can probably make this transformation comfortably inside a
Word document. That’s not me, though. Rewriting there feels like
“failed text being edited,” over and over and over again.
The
spreadsheet does something useful for my brain: it makes the act of
translation visible. On the left is what worked when I was standing
in front of a room. On the right is what has to work when I'm not
there anymore. Low stress, lots of little steps, and a real sense of
progress as the article comes together.
Bit by bit, as they say, and sooner or later it all gets done. With my spreadsheet method, it gets done faster, and with a lot less stress.
YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:
How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: Before the prose comes the plan. This post works through my approach to choosing a journal, figuring out an article’s likely shape, building a broad outline, and assembling the bibliography that will support the writing.
Writing with Scissors and Tape: When a continuity draft had all the right material but none of the right choreography, I stopped trying to line-edit and just cut the thing apart. Paper strips, index cards, scissors, and tape became a way to see the argument again.
The Editing Horizon:Shaping the Argument First: Editing gets easier when you stop trying to fix everything at once. This post separates argument-level revision from sentence-level polish and makes the case for giving each kind of editorial work its own turn.
