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The first rule for writing scholarly articles is to make sure that your manuscript is the kind of article that the journal publishes. Study the articles in the journal to get an idea of what topics are of most interest to the publication and examine how the articles are written. Make sure that someone else hasn't already covered your topic.

The second rule for writing scholarly articles is to carefully follow the journal's specifications for submitting articles. Usually, the following are provided during article submission: Title of article, Abstract, Literature review, Materials and methods, Body of the article, Discussion, Conclusion, and References.

In general, manuscripts should be methodologically sound, thoughtfully argued, and well crafted. Manuscripts must not have been published elsewhere or be currently under consideration for any other publication. If you are to write an article for any publication, be sure to follow its guidelines about style and content. Also, be certain that your article is on a subject of interest to the journal.

While writing a journal article, the entire text should lead ...
... to a conclusion that your readers will find interesting and useful. When you talk about your ideas and projects in conversation, you don't necessarily have to come to conclusions; you're not writing something for others to study and evaluate. But when you write in the expository mode, you must come to a conclusion about your topic, and you need to marshal the evidence and use the appropriate techniques of persuasion to support your conclusions. If you don't have anything to prove and therefore don't prove anything, your text will be formless and little more than meandering, conversational chit-chat.

Furthermore, when you've finished writing your article, consider moving your conclusion to the beginning. Readers want to know what your conclusions are when they start reading the article. Articles are not mystery stories, so don't save the important stuff for the last page. Once you've told your readers your conclusions, you can then explain how you conducted your research and arrived at your findings.

Following are listed some useful tips to improve the chances of getting an article published. These tips have been adopted from an excellent source, available on the Internet, by Barry Wellman, titled “Writing for International Refereed Journals”.
• First, focus on communicating material of interest to others rather than displaying how brilliant and clever you are.
• Second, tell a "story," which involves organizing your material so that it proceeds logically and coherently and has a conclusion of interest. Your organization is of critical importance here.
• Third, avoid problems, such as lack of focus, poor organization, gaps between your assertions and evidence, and dated scholarship.
• Fourth, avoid jargon and endlessly citing "the usual suspects", such as Barthes, Foucault, and Habermas, or others as appropriate to your discipline.

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