A Thousand Words A Day

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Location: Columbus, Ohio, United States

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Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Back to academic writing for a day. I know that this is not the purpose of this particular blog, but writing is writing is writing, so I am counting it. I am attending a meeting this coming week in Chicago where I will be presenting a paper and attending a number of sessions. The paper has also been accepted for publication (PUBLICATION! woo! hoo!) in the organization's journal, which is to be published in June or July. In addition, I have been encouraged to attend the sessions where the Distinguished Papers will be announced. It seems like a bit of a hint, not to get ahead of myself, but I have a good feeling that I may see my name engraved on a plaque. This would be a good good good good thing.

I also did some other work for this conference, which was helpful for me. I reviewed a pair of papers for the conference, and it seemed to me that I wrote better than these other people. Not that my academic research was any better than these other papers, but I think my actual writing was better than these others. Word choice, organization, grammar, spelling, clarity, etc . . . I really think I have an advantage over other academics when it comes to presentations and publications, because I actually write well.

I have always known that I wrote well. I have gotten comments in the past on memos (really) that I have written, and have always had a good facility with words. Much of academic writing is not intended to be clear and accessible, and in those journals and for those conferences, I am out of luck, because I do not write in the math-laden, quantitative mode of others. So the M F A and the Journal of Finance and the Financial Review and the Q R E F and a bunch of other similar spots are out of the question. But there are still a number of organizations that will take my papers and even a few journals that will take my research and writing work. The Journal of the Academy of Finance will take my first article, and I have hope of taking the next step in the research over the summer and revising the paper. I think I will be able to spin the paper upwards in quality. I have my sights set on the Journal of Portfolio Management, which is a fit for the topic of my work and also is a somewhat lighter (in tone and in attitude, not in quality) journal. But the J P M has credibility and would be a nice thing to put on the old promotion and tenure report, so I look forward to submitting a paper to it.

I have also agreed to review papers for the Journal, not just the conference. We have not gotten those yet, and I expect them to be better, to be the "cream of the crop," or at least to have been revised from the conference paper. I hope that this will be a quality selective journal, and not just a vanity press for the organization. I need publications, but I also need publications that are of an appropriate quality to be respected by those who are reviewing my packet.

But I am looking forward to the conference presentation, and certainly am looking forward to the publication of the journal this summer. I will write about these things when they happen.

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