| The Writing Center Journal's primary purpose is to publish articles,
reviews, and announcements of interest to writing center personnel.
We therefore invite manuscripts that explore issues or theories
related to writing center dynamics or administration. We are especially
interested in theoretical articles and in reports of research related
to or conducted in writing centers. In addition to administrators
and practitioners from college and university writing centers, we
encourage directors of high school and middle school writing centers
to submit manuscripts. The Writing Center Journal also welcomes
letters responding to WCJ articles and reviews.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I submit a manuscript to Writing
Center Journal?
Email your manuscript as an attached Microsoft Word file to both
nlerner@mit.edu and eboquet@mail.fairfield.edu. If you don't have
access to Word, send your manuscript as an RTF file. Your email
note acts as a cover letter; thus, please make reference to the
title of your manuscript and supply your complete contact information
(mailing address, phone, email, fax).
What should my submitted manuscript look
like?
All manuscripts are potentially sent out for blind review. Thus,
it is essential that you remove all identifying information
in headers, footers, body of the text and references. Also,
WCJ manuscripts should conform to the specifications described
in the current Modern Language Association (MLA) style guide.
Please refer to Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of
Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: MLA, 2003. For instruction
on preparing manuscripts in MLA format, see Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA
Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 2nd ed. New
York: MLA, 1992.
What happens to my manuscript once I've
emailed it to Beth and Neal?
Every manuscript submitted to WCJ can potentially go through
six stages before publication:
Stage 1: Once you have emailed your manuscript to us,
we first send an acknowledgement email and tell you of our intention
to get back to you within two weeks as to your manuscript's
status. We both then read your manuscript and discuss whether
or not to send it out for blind review.
If we decide not to send your manuscript out for review, we
try to let you know within two or three weeks of your sending
it to us; we don't want to tie up your work when you could be
sending it elsewhere.
Stage 2: If we do send your manuscript out for review,
you will get an email note from us telling you so, and from
that point you can expect to get those reviews back in about
eight weeks.
Manuscripts sent out for review go to two readers, usually
one who has established expertise on your particular topic and
one who is a more generalist reader of writing center literature
(for a list of current reviewers, click here).
Reviewers are asked to choose one of four possible recommendations
for your manuscript: 1) accept as is; 2) accept with revision;
3) revise and resubmit; 4) reject (click here
for an explanation of these categories). We also ask reviewers
to read and comment on manuscripts in a way that would be most
helpful to you to revise for eventual publication.
The review process is blind: reviewers do not know you
are the author, and we leave it up to the reviewers to choose
whether or not to reveal themselves to you.
Stage 3: Once we have received the reviews of your manuscript,
we give everything a careful reading: your original manuscript,
the two reviews, and the recommendations on publication. The
end result in almost all cases is that we send the reviews back
to you plus additional comments from us, sometimes brief, sometimes
lengthy, but all indicating the areas of revision that we'd
like to see if your manuscript is to appear in a future issue
of WCJ.
Stage 4: If your manuscript has received an "accept-with-revision"
decision, we hope that you revise as quickly as possible so
that we can move toward publication. Once you have sent us a
revised manuscript, we then send it back to one of the original
reviewers for another read and to determine if her/his original
comments were adequately addressed. We give the reviewer about
four to six weeks to make this decision.
Stage 5: As we get closer to the publication of the
issue in which your manuscript will appear, we will be in touch
about minor edits, author(s) bios, formatting issues or anything
else that will affect the final publication of your manuscript.
Once the issue is prepared for printing, you will receive page
proofs of your article, which you'll need to proofread closely.
Beth and Neal will also do lots of proofreading in this final
stage, but the more eyes that can look for errors, the better.
Stage 6: You've been published in The Writing Center
Journal. Congratulations!
Why would a manuscript not be sent out
for review?
This decision is informed by several factors: the quality of your
manuscript, the relevance of the topic to WCJ readers,
and the possibility that we are considering manuscripts on a similar,
if not identical, topic. However, the most common reason for not
sending out a manuscript for review is that it simply doesn't
seem appropriate for WCJ. We suggest you look carefully
through previous issues of the journal to get a sense of audience,
format (particularly for presenting quantitative research), and
topics of interest. Whatever topic you choose to research and
write about, it is important that you ground your discussion in
the current related literature on writing centers and composition
studies.
What do the four reviewers' recommendations
mean?
Reviewers are asked to choose one of four possible recommendations
for your manuscript:
- Accept as is: While we offer this possibility to reviewers,
we have yet to see a manuscript that didn't need some revision
or editing, even if minor. Still, we hold out hope that your
manuscript will be so highly polished that everyone involved
will want to rush it into print.
- Accept with revision: This category means that the reviewers
felt strongly about your manuscript, but had a few recommendations
in order to make your manuscript even stronger. Manuscripts
in this category will be sent out for one more round of review
to one of the two original reviewers once you send a revised
version back to us.
- Revise and resubmit: Manuscripts in this category show promise
in terms of the topic addressed. However, the reviewers feel
that a substantial amount of revision would need to take place
in order for the manuscript to be acceptable. In these cases,
we will send out the revised manuscript to two new reviewers,
i.e., its clock will be set back to Stage 1. However, we don't
preclude the possibility that you'll make substantial improvement
to your manuscript, and thus we might decide to send it back
to one of the original reviewers for re-review.
- Reject: In a few cases, both reviewers will feel that a manuscript
will not be worth pursuing further. We try to minimize this
result by choosing manuscripts to send out for review that show
some promise; however, in some cases both reviewers will recommend
to cut a manuscript loose, and we'll support that decision.
What percent of manuscripts submitted get
reviewed?
Since May, 2002, we have sent out about 65% of the manuscripts
we've received for review. Of the manuscripts reviewed, about
a quarter of them were deemed not worth pursuing further by the
reviewers.
What percent of manuscripts submitted get
published?
Since May, 2002, we've published six of the articles we've received
(or 14%). However, that's a misleading statistic; we only have
room for three or four articles per issue. Thus, many articles
we have received might appear in future issues.
Who reviews manuscripts for WCJ?
Manuscripts sent out for review go to two readers, one who has
established expertise on your particular topic and one who is
a more generalist reader of writing center literature (for
a list of current reviewers, click here).
The review process is blind: reviewers do not know you
are the author, and we leave it up to the reviewers to choose
whether or not to reveal themselves to you.
I submitted my manuscript in June; when
will it appear in print?
If a manuscript winds its way through all six stages outlined
in response to the first FAQ, the timeline is about five to six
months at best. However, that estimate greatly depends upon an
author's speed in revising and the quality of those revisions.
WCJ comes out (ideally) around Jan. 1 and July 1, so you
can work backwards to see when something you'd submit now might
appear.
I have a manuscript in progress; at what
point should I send it to you?
A variation on this question is, "I'm much too close to my
manuscript at this point; can I send it to you and you'll get
me some feedback via the review process?" Most likely if
you're feeling that your manuscript does not represent a final
version of your work, it will be unlikely that we would send it
out for review. Ideally, we would like to give extensive feedback
to everything we receive, but time simply does not allow that
practice. Instead, we encourage you to seek out potential readers
and not simply your colleague down the hall who is in an entirely
different field. Keep your eye on WCenter conversations or check
the archives to see who has had something to say or has an interest
in your topic, and find out if that person would be willing to
read your manuscript. Or check the back issues of WCJ to
see who might be interested in your topic and contact that person.
Or take your manuscript to your own or someone else's writing
center for feedback. We have found the writing center field to
be a generous one, willing to practice the collaborative learning
and teaching that it espouses. We urge you to take advantage of
those qualities and find feedback for your manuscript before you
send it to us.
Do you have any advice for revising a
conference talk, a seminar paper or a dissertation chapter into
a publishable article?
Many of the articles we publish start out as a paper delivered
at a conference, as a piece of a thesis/dissertation or as a paper
written for a course. However, we also find that a fairly thorough
revision needs to take place for manuscripts written under those
very different conditions and for very different audiences. Besides
the obvious differences of language meant to be heard versus language
meant to be read, conference talks usually have a narrower audience
than the WCJ readership and tend not to include as much
background information or are not as firmly grounded in the existing
literature as we would like WCJ articles to be. And as
dissertation survivors ourselves, we often advise post-graduates
to put those chapters aside for a long while and to work on something
else. The emotional investment that a dissertation or thesis requires
and the complicated audience issues that are part of the genre
can often lead to pretty convoluted prose in article form. If
the topic is one you still find interesting and think will be
compelling for your reader, try starting your writing from scratch,
rather than cutting and pasting from your dissertation or thesis.
It takes a long time to become free from such monumental events,
and writing that article unencumbered from your previous prose
might even help in that process. So, send us your conference talks,
dissertation chapters, and seminar papers, but only after they've
undergone an extensive process of revision to turn them into articles.
If my article is accepted, what do I need
to do in order to prepare it for printing?
WCJ manuscripts are formatted according to the current
Modern Language Association (MLA) style guide (currently 6th edition).
Please be sure to conform to the format described in that guide.
Also, your attention to the following features will greatly speed
up our layout and printing process:
- Block quotes: In current MLA format, direct quotes
that run more than four lines should be set off from the text
by being indented one-inch from the left-hand margin and double-spaced
(with no extra spaces before and after the block quote).
- Reference consistency: Be sure to check that each of
your references in the body of your manuscript is included in
your Works Cited page, and that every entry in your Works Cited
page appears in the body of your manuscript.
- Spaces after periods: In current MLA format, only one
space is needed after a period. This spacing applies to the
body of your text and to your Works Cited.
- Footnotes/Endnotes: Current MLA format calls for the
use of Endnotes only for "content notes" or "bibliographic
notes." The former offers readers "comment, explanation,
or information that the text cannot accommodate" and the
latter contains "either several sources or evaluative comments
on sources" (see MLA Handbook. 5th ed. sect. 5.5.1,
227). All references should appear as parenthetical citations.
Please do not use your word processing program's automatic
endnoting feature. Instead, number each endnote with a superscript
number and include a separate page before your Works Cited that
is labeled "Notes."
- Previously printed references: If you cite articles
from any of the several collections of writing center scholarship,
be sure to include both the original appearance of the article
and its reprinting (see MLA Handbook. 5th ed. sect. 4.6.7,
129).
- Illustrations: Figures, tables, and other illustrations
should be sent as separate files with an indication in the body
of your text as to where to insert the illustration. Our preferred
format for an illustration is a TIFF or an EPS file or hardcopy
that we can scan; however, you can send an illustration that's
in a Word file, and we'll convert. Also, before you include
an illustration, be sure that it is the most effective way of
making your point. We have often seen simple graphs or tables
that were best offered in a sentence or two rather than an illustration.
Last updated July 14, 2003
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