On Feedback and Publication

Creative Commons License 2.0 / Bill Bradford

Over the past few days, I've circulated my work in progress to a few different peers. The first was John, a neuroscience major I met a couple of week ago, the roommate of a friend of mine. He actually thought my paper sounded really interesting, and suggested that I could tie the Bible into my argument. William Tindale's Bible, he said, helped to shape our English language today more than Shakespeare or any other single source. I think this would be a really helpful way to connect to a more general audience.

The second peer that I connected with is my friend Ira from my Italian class, who is pursuing her master's degree in Linguistics. After talking with her briefly about my paper, she told me that she had also written a paper about the use of language in Alice and Wonderland, and so she emailed it to me. I gave her the link to the blog and she also said that she would talk to some of her own peers in her linguistics classes, some of which majored in English for their undergraduate degree, to see if they had any ideas, and that she would email me if she or they had any more suggestions. This is enormously helpful because I can connect to a broader audience of people who are also interested in language itself, and I'm excited to get more feedback.


Now, one of the end goals of this paper is to submit it for publication, so I looked into places to which I could potentially submit my paper as well. The first is Schwa: Linguistic Perspectives on Language, a student journal published by the Department of Linguistics and English Language here at BYU. I think this would potentially be a perfect fit in terms of subject matter to publish my paper, since I'm looking at the language in these novels and the effects thereof.

When searching for academic conferences, I found a call for papers for the April-June 2014 issue of the International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies, which publishes papers on topics related to English language, foreign languages in relation to English, and literature. The deadline for submission is the 30th of April, which is a perfect time frame in which I can write and submit my paper.

I could also condense my paper and submit it as a guest blogger. I found a call for guest bloggers for Blog About ESL, which is asking for posts about anything about the English language. I may write this condensed version of paper and submit it here first before expanding to the size of an academic paper. I think this would be a good opportunity to write my thoughts succinctly first.