We all know that writing in its own right is a complex process. It is even more daunting when we as researchers have to write for academic journals. I have written for journals in South Africa, America and Switzerland thus far. I found that for each journal I had to adopt various writing styles. I’m not certain if that is a good thing or a bad thing?

My experience with writing for a pedagogical research journal in the United States was that I was able to write in a more “journal entry” kind of format. I had a sense of “freedom” in writing for that academic journal and I could bring in a more personal touch to my writing as well as really write about what I thought on the topic. Don’t misunderstand me, I had included data from my research in the article, but I had this sense of liberty writing in first person, and I was not criticized for doing that. However, I had to include more research work that was from American academics and world-renown academics.

I found the Swiss journal, a bit too formal, and there too I got the sense that I had to include academic work that the Europeans were familiar with. I had to include work from academics in Europe and of course “world-renown academics”. I think the Swiss journal does welcome first person writing, but one has to keep it to a minimum. I didn’t get that sense of freedom in my writing as I did for the American journal.

For the three South African journals, in which two were language journals and one an educational policy journal, well, they just expected me to fill up my articles with academics mainly from South Africa. I remember my very first article that I wrote for a South African journal, I was so heavily criticized saying that I never included more South African research work. Even though my article was related to teaching of writing in South Africa, the weird thing was that at that time when I wrote my very first article, there were not many South African academics that were focusing on L2 academic writing at tertiary level. It appears that for South African journals, they do not really appreciate first person writing. I found that the style of writing for South African journals are extremely formal, and the editors/reviewers can shoot you down for not including them in your article. Including quotations from the editor of the journal can be daunting especially when that editor never wrote much on the topic I am addressing in my article. It is then that I want to scream blue murder (lol).

Have you also experienced this pressure that you must include references from the editor and referees of the journal? I feel that doing that just puts so much more pressure and stress on us as academics.

Verbra Pfeiffer

University of South Africa