Turning a Substack post into a journal article

The barrier between worlds is more porous than you'd think

Last August, I published this post:

The article was about Indiana University’s response to the encampment on its grounds over the summer. It was also about the fact that I’d just read Campus Life by Helen Horowitz and wanted to talk about that. So, I did the classic scholarly move and took the book’s framework and applied it to a new event.

Recently, my department at Indiana published its annual student-edited scholarly journal. The article I wrote for it was an edited version of that Substack post from last August. You can read it here.

I’d like to talk about my process editing the text and examine just how different the two articles really are.

At a glance

Let’s start by looking at some things that are immediately apparent differences.

The most obvious is a difference in format. The journal article includes a summary abstract up front as well as keywords. It also does not include photographs. I could have included them, but they served vibes purposes in the original post and were not strictly necessary. Since I had limited space available, I chose to leave them out.

You might also notice that the titles are similar, but not the same. The blog looked like this:

The journal article looks like this:

I changed the title because the original made it sound like a quote, but no one ever said it. The new title makes it clearer that I’m putting forward an idea.

I also changed the subtitle because “overlooked” presumes that I have some information about who has looked at what. I don’t. I can contend that some oppositions are not explicit, but I can’t claim that I’m the only one looking at them.

You might notice that my name is different between the two. I am not sure that this matters, but I’ve chosen to use “Matthew J. Ely” as my academic identity. The reason is simple: there are other Matt Elys in academia. Including the middle initial makes my name easier to distinguish from other people sharing my name who have published journal articles. It’s the same logic for Michael B. Jordan, the actor, not wanting to just use his first and last name.

Despite my efforts, our use of a middle initial may be the only thing that Michael B. Jordan and I have in common.

Using a middle initial with a nickname (Matt J. Ely) just feels wrong for some reason. So, by default, I’m Matthew J.

You’ll see in the journal article that I combine several thoughts from the original into single paragraphs.

This is because on Substack I tend to use single-sentence paragraphs much more often. That can work for a blog format, but it is not recommended for academic writing.

Additionally, you’ll see that I have in-text citations. On Substack, I typically cite via hyperlink, but adding the author/year in parenthesis just clutters the text. In constructing the journal article, I realized that I probably needed more hyperlinks in the original than I’d included. So there are citations to more sources there than I had at first.

Put simply, it’s easier to fudge your references online. I’m sure I could have included references to everything… but the journal article demanded it in a way that blogs don’t.

Organization

You may also notice that most of the section headers are the same in the original and the article. Clearly, I just couldn’t get over how clever I’d been with “Rebels with a Cause.”

One exception is my short section on “outsiders.” It was originally labeled “Despite everything, most folks just go to class.” I relabeled that as “The Outsider Outside Binary Oppositions.” Mostly, I felt that the original phrasing was too informal. I thought the new label more clearly represented the contents.

This is the overall trend you’ll see comparing the two texts. The core of both is the same, but the journal article is a more careful text which is better labeled and structured.

This is evident in the biggest change I made. My goal was to avoid letting the article drag out. I noticed that one part of my original text was dragging more than the others:

The effect of this section was saying “Oh yeah, and here’s one other thing!” This did not add to my explanation of Horowitz’s model, and it ended up repeating more than innovating. Deleting this section gave me some space, and I used it to add a new conclusion:

The original text concluded with the section about institutional outsiders. What my reviewers helped me understand was that I never really offered a conclusion. What did I hope to accomplish with the article? I had applied Horowitz’s framework, but I never justified why the application of that particular framework was meaningful. Just being “interesting” is not sufficient.

So, after deleting the extraneous section, I wrote new material to state explicitly why my approach is useful and applicable to more than just this one situation. It’s funny that I spent the text trying to make implicit oppositions explicit while I originally left my own original conclusion implicit. But realizing that my implication was not as apparent as I thought was another useful element of the review process.

Overall, I think the journal version is not fundamentally new. It contains many of the same words and phrases of the original. It is, however, a more refined and readable version. Scholarly journal articles are not always known first for their readability, but I hope to make that one feature of my writing.

If you’re interested, I hope you will enjoy comparing the blog original to its journal final version. Let me know what you think of the changes!

-Matt