Module 3 Post

As a creative writer dealing with poetry in particular, my relationship to the concepts of peer review, citation styles, and the invisible college may differ immensely from a student of literature. I will encounter citation styles and peer review as I construct academic papers for a few elective courses in literature. However, I do see how these concepts intersect my own course of study.

First and foremost, the concept of an invisible college pertains immensely to poem-making, as many poets, including myself, depend on blogs, social networks, and e-mail to receive feedback from both professional and nonprofessional writers. We also use these mediums to discover new and integral work of other writers. RSS feeds have been particularly useful for me in locating articles introducing new poets, creative writing commentary, and fresh work, and thus have become a crucial part of my invisible college.

Peer review seamlessly extends from the idea of the invisible college for creative writers as expressed in the above paragraph. Outside of the personal workshop, peer review is often carried out online. The major difference I see between scholarly peer review and simple online peer review of creative works is that scholarly peer review offers validation to articles. Peer review of creative works merely helps the writer revise pieces, but does not give the piece more clout, integrity, or importance. It is possible that if a book of poems is chosen by a certain renowned poet, that would add value to the work and would cause it to be picked up by more readers and fellow writers.

Peer review in the humanities does seem to be rapidly changing, particularly with online networking and publication sites. Now it may be more nebulous whether your reviews are coming from actual scholars, which, for writers of literary articles, could be useless. However, I enjoy that publications of scholarly work were begun to reach all matter of readers, and it seems exciting to me that all matter of readers may now provide feedback.

Citation styles will no doubt impact my academic writing, should I decide to pursue it beyond the bounds of classroom assignments, and the variety of styles will definitely impact how I may format works in order to publish them in certain literary journals. As Soraya Palmer wrote in her first blog post, I feel that a lot of my research for my coursework will come from personal experiences which won't require citation. However, occasionally it could be useful to cite a work that may have influenced a poem, and I would definitely have to research that process.