Laudator Temporis Acti

William H. Race, "The Process of Developing a Publishable Paper in Classics: An Illustrative Example and Some Suggestions," Classical Journal 100.3 (February-March, 2005) 301-305 (at 303-305):

1. Start with primary material and trust your instincts. This is the origin of your original contribution. If you jump too quickly into the secondary literature, it is easy to get lost in a sea of δόξα.

2. Make lists and folders of possible topics based on these insights, observations, and questions that arise in your reading and teaching. You never know when your καιρός will come.

3. Make commitments. Submit abstracts. Give talks. As I mentioned, abstracts and handouts are wonderful tools to sharpen thinking. In fact, for some topics, I begin with the handout, which, like arranging images for an archaeology lecture, provides a clear outline of the subject.

4. Summon up all of your fortitude and faith when facing the initial write-up. It takes guts, but there is no better means to clarify your ideas and insights than presenting them in writing. It takes nothing less than a leap of faith to believe that a convincing argument will eventually result.

5. Don't try to get everything exactly right the first time; it is impossible and may bring on self-defeating perfectionism. Don't try to paint a Sistine Chapel; you cannot create a vast masterpiece. Just get as many of your relevant ideas down in writing as best you can.

6. Get help. Check with knowledgeable people to make sure you are not inadvertently duplicating what has been done and to help you locate your work in the wider scholarship. They also can help you focus and cut—or delegate to footnotes—distracting material, however brilliant it may seem to you.

7. Submit your best effort, not the last word. Make sure, however, that the copy is clean, with absolutely no typos, misspelled titles, garbled references, or incorrect Greek or Latin. Whatever else we may be, we are also philologists, responsible for accurate knowledge of these languages. If you can, get proofreading from two sources: 1) a good general reader to check its readability; 2) an expert to catch the inevitable technical slips.

8. Be grateful for the feedback of referees and editors. In the 25 years I have been publishing, I have been treated very strictly, but fairly, by referees and editors. Sure, there have been (from my perspective) mistakes, misunderstandings, and certainly hurt feelings. Occasionally, a referee was harsher than necessary or simply dyspeptic. But, overall, this system of blind refereeing has done more than any other thing to sharpen my work, clarify my thought, and challenge me to do better.

9. If an editor gives you the opportunity to revise, take it! Meet the referees at least half way. Say no when you have to, but explain why. Provide a full bill of particulars to the editor. If the door is opened, go through it. I have never regretted following referees' advice as far as I could and have been very well served by their hours of hard work, difficult as it was to face their often dispiriting critiques. Many times I have found that the solution to a criticism simply involved dropping a point or stating it more clearly.

10. The path to publication is long. There are many setbacks and revisions. Do not be discouraged. Even a full professor submitting an article to a refereed journal risks the same rejection you do and, believe me, takes rejection hard.