SoTL Writing Residency Questionnaire
Writing group members will use this information when providing feedback on your drafts.
Your Name:
Name of Target Journal:
1) Look at the aims and scope of target journal. (This info will be on the journal’s website or cover.) Write a
one or two sentence summary of the journal’s mission to share with the writing group.

2) What formal instructions are you given in terms of length and documentation format?

3) In the past three years, has the journal published SoTL work (whether or not they call it that)? Look for
whether they have published articles based on classroom data; look at the sample sizes; look at whether
the author is the instructor. What type of studies do they usually publish?

4) Find at least two recent articles from the target journal that have a similar structure to what you want to
do. The content doesn’t matter. Consider the following aspects:
a)

Point of View: Do the articles use first-person or third-person point of view?

b) Formality: How conversational are the articles? What makes you say that? What type of language can you
point to in the articles?

Developed by Dr. Karen Manarin
for the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning SoTL Writing Retreats

c)

Structure: Do the articles use the same structure (for example, subheadings in a particular order), or are
they different? Does the journal encourage a particular structure?

d) What are the proportions of the articles? How many pages is each article? How many of those pages are
devoted to literature review? How many to describing method and methodology? How many to data
analysis or discussion?

e)

What type of evidence do the articles provide? If it is quantitative, how do they present and discuss it? For
example, do they use figures to help explain the data?
If it is qualitative, how do they present and discuss it? For example, do they integrate each quotation into
a sentence and then discuss it? Do they group quotations together under themes and then discuss them
later?

5) Why do you think this journal would be a good fit for your project? What do readers expect from this
journal? Can you provide that?

Developed by Dr. Karen Manarin
for the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning SoTL Writing Retreats