Most rejections aren't about flawed research.
They're about a paper a reviewer can't follow. Two weeks, self-paced, to decide what yours argues and build the structure that carries it — before you write a single section.
$97 USD · Immediate access · No expiration · 25% student discount
Yes, find my argumentKick-Start Your Paper is a self-paced, two-week workshop.
You come in with a finished project and no paper. You leave with your core argument written down, an abstract, a full structural outline, and a drafted introduction that situates your work in the conversation it belongs to.
A preparatory video and four tutorials, each with a worksheet. Two and a half hours of watching, total. The writing takes as long as the writing takes, and you set the schedule.
Did anyone teach you how to write a journal paper?
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Me neither.
You have the project. The data are clean, the analysis holds, the finding is real. What you have instead of a paper is a folder: notes from a conference, three paragraphs written in March that you can no longer reconstruct the point of, a chapter you keep meaning to convert.
You have opened the document. You have written the first sentence, deleted it, and written a slightly different one.
Fear of the blank page arises from the belief that you have to start with the first sentence.
You don't. And the reason the sentence won't come is usually that a decision underneath it hasn't been made yet: what this paper argues, and where it sits in a conversation other people are already having.
Reviewers rarely put it that way. They write that the argument isn't clear. That the contribution is underdeveloped. That the introduction is convoluted and the point is buried. Then you revise for six months and send back a paper with the same unmade decision in a different order.
Try this now
You can run this test before you buy anything.
Write one sentence: "This paper argues that ______."
Not what it's about. What it argues. If the sentence comes out as a topic — this paper examines the relationship between X and Y — you have found the thing that has been stopping you.
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That isn't a writing problem. It's a decision, and you cannot write around it. Every structural choice downstream depends on it: what goes in the introduction, which literature is relevant, which findings lead, what the discussion is allowed to claim.
Most people can't write that sentence on the first attempt. That is not a discouraging fact about you. It's the reason this workshop exists, and it's the first thing we do.
Why this, why now?
Framing problems are cheap to fix before you write and expensive to fix after. Before, it's an afternoon and a blank page. After, it's a manuscript you've spent four months on, held together by an argument you never quite made, and a revision request that asks you to rebuild the foundation while the walls are up.
A round of review you didn't need to go through costs months you don't get back.
I've reviewed more than 100 manuscripts for over 45 journals, and I keep a list of the reasons papers get rejected or come back demanding major revision. There are thirteen. Five of them are the same problem wearing different clothes: no argument stated clearly and early, no structure serving it, objectives that don't match the contents, a literature review that surveys a field instead of building a case, and a paper written as a report rather than an argument.
Those five are what these two weeks are for.
The other eight are real too, and this workshop doesn't touch most of them. Correlation still won't equal causation when you're finished. But the five it does address are the ones you can fix now, cheaply, before there's a manuscript sitting on top of them.
This is the part I do first with private clients, before we spend one-on-one hours on anything else.
What's inside
Five self-paced tutorials and a preparatory video, covering:
- Getting started, and what to do about writing blocks before they stall you
- The abstract — your paper's road map, not the thing you write last
- Your core argument — the single most important thing to get clear
- Structure — the foundation everything else sits on
- The introduction and literature review — engaging the conversation your paper is joining
A workbook
With an exercise for every tutorial, so you're always writing, not just watching. You end the two weeks with a document, not a page of notes about a video.
The Watering Hole
The community discussion board, where you can ask questions and I answer them. Post your argument sentence and I'll tell you whether it's actually an argument. Ask what to do when the literature contradicts itself.
Everything is available the moment you register. No waiting for modules to unlock, and no expiration.
You can watch the abstract tutorial free before you decide. Start there.
What you walk out with
- A sentence that says what your paper argues, written down where you can see it
- An abstract you'd be willing to hand a colleague
- A structural outline for the full manuscript
- A drafted introduction that situates your research and your point of view
- A working plan for the writing itself, built to survive a normal week
You come in knowing your research. You leave knowing how to write it.
Is this for you?
This is for you if:
- You've finished a project, a chapter, or a pilot study, and there's still no paper
- You've been sitting on the data for months, or years
- You keep revising and you're not sure what you're fixing
- A reviewer told you the argument wasn't clear and you didn't know what to do with that
- English is an additional language for you, and you suspect it will be used to dismiss the research
- You're publishing from outside a university and you're not sure the conventions apply to you
This is not for you if:
- You already know your core argument, have your structure, and just need writing time
- You want someone to write the paper. This isn't about me fixing your paper for you.
- You want a guarantee of publication. No one can honestly offer you that.
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I think this reflects a framing problem in my paper rather than a journal-selection problem.
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Jing Chen, Independent Researcher, China
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Jessica's most distinctive strength was her ability to see the skeleton of an argument even in a messy, unresolved draft. And my drafts were messy! I would have a wealth of ideas but struggled to give them shape.
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Harpreet Kaur, Independent Researcher, India
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I wouldn't have published — or even tried to — a paper on urban agriculture without Jessica's support.
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Amanda Chandra, Landscape Architect, Singapore
Hello! I'm Jessica...
I've reviewed more than 100 manuscripts for over 45 journals. I've written the comment that says the argument isn't clear. I've also received it.
Some years into publishing I wrote a paper I was excited about. Mixed methods, years of fieldwork, findings I thought mattered. It was rejected. I revised the language, tightened the organization, submitted elsewhere. Rejected. Revised, resubmitted, rejected again.
The third editor wrote back. The research was robust, he said. Timely. But I needed to learn how to write a journal paper, and here was a book he recommended.
I had a PhD. I had published. I had reviewed for about a dozen journals by then. And an editor had handed me remedial homework.
He was right. I had been writing reports of my research and calling them papers. IMRAD is the rungs. The core argument is the ladder. Without it the rungs collapse, and no amount of revision stacks them back up.
I rewrote that paper. Once the argument was explicit, it turned out to be two papers. Two submissions, two acceptances. Since then I have not received a single rejection for structure, organization, or a missing argument. Reviewers still argue with me — about sample size, about definitions, about how far I've pushed an interpretation. That's the real conversation, and it's the one worth having.
Two decades on the academic track: a PhD in health and behavioral sciences, a Fulbright-Nehru scholarship in Delhi, seven years as an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, 33 graduate students. Then I realized I was climbing the wrong mountain.
The knowledge that makes publishing possible is treated as tacit, which is a polite way of saying it gets passed along in hallways, at institutions that have the right hallways. I assembled mine alone and slowly, one rejection at a time. That's the part I'd rather you didn't have to repeat.
Kick-Start Your Paper!Â
Self-paced * Access anytime
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$97 USD
Access anytime & set your own schedule!
You come in with a finished project and no paper. You leave with your core argument written down, an abstract, a full structural outline, and a drafted introduction that situates your work in the conversation it belongs to.
25% student discount * Request a code here
Yes, find my argument
