Let's define here "being a scholar" as having a good sense of where your field is (and for anything people are interested in, there is a field). The standard w

Let's define here "being a scholar" as having a good sense of where your field is (and for anything people are interested in, there is a field). The standard way is that PhD students (often non-scholars) team up with more senior, well-read researchers (i.e. experienced scholars), with the latter at a minimum explaining and framing the work and in many cases guiding and shaping it. You get marginalized by the community for bad scholarship just as proposing crappy conference talks will lead to "marginalization" by the conference organizers: there's already so much content to consume, and scholarship and other requirements serve to shape and organize people's contributions in a way that means the community as a whole can make progress. As for advice on how to write better: Read a lot. Get rejected a lot and learn to read between the lines. If you want a friendlier environment, aim for workshops rather than major conferences. Don't be afraid of putting in the work that's necessary for a good paper.