Guidelines for Authors Submitting Papers

Standards and Criteria for Submitting Articles to The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice

• This Journal is the platform for the Writing-PAD 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 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

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