Publish & Flourish: Helping Scholars Become Better, More Prolific Writers

Abstract

Some scholars want help from educational developers to become better, more prolific writers. This study examines one such program, Publish & Flourish, that holds participants accountable for writing daily and for receiving weekly feedback from peers on drafts of writing. In this mixed-methods study, 95% of participants (N = 93) reported that they improved their writing by making it more organized and reader centered. Participants also reported that they increased their extrapolated average of submissions of scholarly manuscripts per year from about two to almost six. We then compared Publish & Flourish to several other studies of scholarly writing programs, each of which had only a few participants or failed to have participants report their minutes of writing on a shared and monitored spreadsheet. We concluded that if daily writing is required and reported on a shared and monitored spreadsheet, scholarship programs can be scalable to large numbers of participants. Therefore, Publish & Flourish, with its accountability for writing daily, may be superior to other programs for educational developers who want to improve writing and jumpstart research productivity with many participants on a large scale.