Guidelines for Authors Submitting Papers

Standards and Criteria for Submitting Articles to The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (external link)


  • This Journal is the platform for the Writing-PAD (external link) network (it stands for ‘Writing Purposefully in Art and Design’).
  • It seeks to listen to, and to inform, the academic community that supports students of art, design or craft.
  • The Journal's editorial team welcomes papers and articles that support these initiatives and activities.

Submission

  • See the Call for Papers
  • Please email full papers to

Major Papers

  • Full-length articles are normally expected to be somewhere around 5k to 7k words.
  • Suitable submissions should be relevant to the Writing-PAD network’s general domain of interest.
  • It is always risky for editors to specify what they think they want. We try to remain open-minded.
  • We are probably seeking colourful, passionate, well-reasoned papers, supported by evidence.
  • Please see the task checklist for authors before submitting your piece.

Articles

  • Would-be contributors may send shorter, well presented submissions
  • Normally, these should also be congruent with the journal’s themes and objectives.
  • E.g. summaries of important ideas, descriptions of experimental activities, work in progress, or research findings.
  • They would normally be somewhere around 2k to 5k words in length.
  • Please see the task checklist for authors before submitting your piece.

Reviews

  • Reviews of appropriate conferences, books, or exhibitions, etc. are also welcome.
  • They would normally be somewhere from 500 words to 2k words in length.

Language

  • Abstracts and papers must be written in English.
  • We encourage the inclusion of neologisms and non-English words
  • However, they should be adequately translated and contextualized.

Images

  • We always encourage authors to submit high quality images to accompany textual contributions.
  • However, these should be developed as an integral and complementary part of the submission.
  • Some authors may like to submit works consisting predominantly of images with captions.
  • Please ensure that you have ownership, or have obtained copyright clearance for any image submitted.
  • Format should be emailed, or sent on CD-rom, as high quality TIFF or JPG files.
  • You may send coloured images (although the Journal is currently in black and white)

Referees

  • Abstracts will normally be selected and refereed papers by members of the Editorial Board.
  • All papers for presentation will be subject to double blind review by at least two referees.
  • All referees are instructed to be open-minded and constructive in their response.
  • However, the journal reserves the right to decline submissions that do not meet with its standards of quality
  • The Journal also reserves the right to decline submissions it does not find relevant to its editorial agenda.

Criteria

  • Referees will ask the following questions when assessing submissions:
  • How relevant is this submission to the aims and ethos of the journal?
  • How well would it support the purposeful practice of writing in art and design?
  • How original and thorough are the research and/or findings of this submission?
  • How clear, well presented and accessible to non-specialists is this submission?
  • How interesting, appealing and inventive is this submission?
  • If used, are case studies presented within a suitably self-reflexive, or critical framework?

Style

  • Please use the Harvard (external link) referencing style.
  • Use double spacing, 1.5cm. margins, 12 point Arial or Verdana font, and paginate consecutively.
  • Justify text only on the left margin (not both Left and Right).

Structure

  • Please arrange your paper in the following order:
  • Author(s) name(s)
  • Title
  • Institution (please put contact details on a separate page)
  • Abstract
  • Up to five keywords
  • Main text
  • Acknowledgements
  • Appendices
  • References
  • Tables
  • Figures and illustrations, together with their accompanying captions, should be presented in a separate file, not in the text itself.

Comprehensive Guidance

  • Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the following notes should be addressed to the Editor.
  • You can also download the publisher’s fully comprehensive style guide (external link)

Please comply with the following standards

  • The following Notes for Contributors (see below) take precedence, especially in the case of bibliographical references.
  • If contributors do not present their text in accordance with to the following guidelines, the Editors may return it for amendment.

General

  • All submissions to the journal should be in English.
  • Submit the article as an email attachment in Word 6 or in Rich Text Format.
  • Do not send files in WordPerfect? or Text files (i.e. with the suffixes ‘.wpf ’ or ‘.txt’).
  • Do not send your article pasted into an email message
  • Please avoid using Word’s ‘Style Gallery’.
  • This is the facility accessed through the menus Format-Theme-Style Gallery-Template, which allows you to use templates to format your text.
  • Send the article in a finished written-up state. We cannot offer stylistic or literary advice on undeveloped drafts.
  • Observe word counts as stated above.
  • Submit a biography of between 50 and 100 words, for inclusion in the journal issue.
  • The abstract will go onto the Intellect website; Place these items at the beginning of your file, with the titles ‘Abstract’ and ‘Biography’.
  • Make sure we have both an email address and a telephone number so that we can contact you at the editing stage.
  • We expect to do most of our business with you by email, but it may be necessary to phone you at the last minute because of urgent editing issues.

Presentation

  • Your title should be in bold at the beginning of the file, without inverted commas.
  • The text, including the notes, should be in Times New Roman 12 point.
  • The text, including the notes, must be double-spaced.
  • The text should have ample margins for annotation by the editorial team.
  • You may send the text justified or unjustified.
  • You may, if you wish, break up your text with sub-titles.
  • These must be in ordinary text, not ‘all caps’.

Quotations

  • Unless agreed by the editors, quotations should normally be in English.
  • Quotations must be enclosed within single inverted commas.
  • Material quoted within cited text should be in double inverted commas.
  • Quotations must be within the body of the text unless they exceed approximately four lines of your text.
  • In this case, they should be separated from the body of the text and indented.
  • Omitted material should be signalled thus:

(…)

  • Note that there are no spaces between the suspension points.
  • Avoid breaking up quotations with an insertion, for example: ‘This approach to miseen- scène’, says MacPherson?, ‘is not sufficiently elaborated’ (MacPherson 1998: 33).

References

  • Please check that ALL of images and quotations are fully referenced before sending your article to us - this is particularly crucial for the website references (see below).
  • Only include bibliographical references if there is a direct quotation from the text, or a direct allusion to the text concerned.
  • In other words, references should not include ‘interesting material which readers might like to know about’.
  • We use the Harvard system for bibliographical references.
  • This means that all quotations must be followed by the name of the author, the date of the publication, and the pagination, thus: (Kaes 1992: 15).
  • PLEASE DO NOT use ‘(ibid.)’.
  • Note that the punctuation should always FOLLOW the reference within brackets, whether a quotation is within the text or an indented quotation.
  • Your references refer the reader to a bibliography at the end of the article, before the endnotes. *The heading should be ‘References’. List the items alphabetically.

In particular...

  • Please do not use an author’s first name
  • Do not use ‘Anon.’ for items for which you do not have an author (because all items must be referenced with an author within the text)
  • Put the year date of publication in brackets
  • Use commas, not full stops, between parts of item
  • absence of ‘in’ after the title of a chapter within a monograph, but please use ‘in’ after chapters in edited volumes
  • name of translator of a book within brackets after title and preceded by ‘trans.’, not ‘transl.’ or ‘translated by’
  • absence of ‘no.’ for the journal number
  • colon between journal volume and number
  • ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’ before page extents

Web references

  • These are no different from other references
  • they must have an author, and that author must be referenced Harvard-style within the text.
  • Unlike paper references, however, webpages can change, so we need a date of access as well as the full web reference.
  • In the list of references at the end of your article, the item should read something like this:

Bowcott, O. (2005, 18 October). "Protests halt online auction to shoot stag", The Guardian Online. Accessed 7 Feb 06

  • If in doubt as to how to reference material on a web page, please contact the editors.

Notes

  • Use as few notes as possible as they can divert the reader’s attention away from your argument.
  • If you do think a note is necessary, make it is as brief and germane as possible.
  • Use Word’s note-making facility, ensuring that your notes are endnotes, not footnotes.
  • Place note calls outside the punctuation, so AFTER the comma or the full stop.
  • The note call must be in superscripted Arabic (1, 2, 3), NOT Roman (i, ii, iii).

Editors

John Wood & Julia Lockheart


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