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 writingpadjournal at googlemail.com

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 with an additional one-line space above and below, and without quote marks at the beginning or end.
Omitted material should be signalled by an ellipsis enclosed in square brackets.

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
writingpadjournal at gmail.com