You enter at week 0, not week 1. The whole book assumes a draft exists to revise — a seminar paper, a conference paper, a thesis chapter. You have none. «Writing Your Article from Scratch» sits at p.390 as an appendix, and it is your actual first session.
Belcher decides form. The dossier decides content. She is pragmatic to the point of cynicism about the game: publish in US journals, make your ideas palatable to reviewers. The dossier's entire point is distinctiveness — the two-traditions rule, an Algerian-side specialism, refusing the crowded default. Take her on how a piece is built and sent. Where she seems to advise on subject, she is out of scope.
Cover to cover this book is 41 sessions, about 30 hours. What follows is 24 sessions, about 19 hours, spread across eleven months and ordered by when you need it rather than by her week numbers. Three chapters are skipped outright, with reasons.
From the mini-course, and it is the part that actually changes the prose. No separate exercises: your retrieval note is the practice. Add one constraint per fortnight and keep the previous ones. Twenty minutes of revision per note, not more. Tap the live one.
One article per session from Early American Literature or American Literature. One sentence per paragraph, in your own words, on a single page — then look at the skeleton with the prose stripped away. Where does the claim land? How much literature review is tolerated, and where does it sit? How is the “so what” stated? How does it close without summarising? By article five you will be predicting the structure. That is the moment you have acquired the genre.
The debate line (added 15 Aug, from Belcher's Week 0 step 8). One further line per article: which live debate does it enter, who is it answering, and can Article 1 touch that debate? Structure tells you how the genre argues; the debate line tells you what the field is arguing about. It feeds the week 6 significance sessions, and it builds the candidate list for the one early-Americanist who gets the brief in January.
📓 Open the writing log in Bear