Writing CommonsContribute

Contribute

Writing Commons reaches a global audience of students, teachers, and knowledge workers in workplace, academic, and public contexts. By sharing your expertise with us, you can reach hundreds of thousands of students and teachers.

At a glance, our 10 a.m. EDT Google Analytics snapshot captures the momentum of Writing Commons. With 160 users from the eastern U.S. actively engaged, it's a bustling digital morning on the North American continent. But as daylight stretches westward, the western U.S. chimes in, soon followed by activity across the Rockies and then the Pacific coast. Distant dots signal participation from the Hawaiian islands, as Asia readies to pick up the relay. As the earth revolves, continents like Europe and Africa prepare to join anew, reflecting the ever-evolving, global conversation about writing and knowledge-making practices.

Invitation to Contribute

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to write for us. We publish original articles on topics of interest to students, writing teachers, and writers in non-academic contexts.

Writing Commons serves as an interdisciplinary reference guide and textbook for students in undergraduate writing courses, including

  • business writing
  • composition
  • creative nonfiction
  • fiction
  • first-year writing
  • workplace writing
  • writing across the curriculum
  • writing in the disciplines.

Writing Commons is the go to source for professionals in professional writing, which is also known as workplace writing.

Audience

By publishing with us, your ideas and practices can reach a broad audience. For example, by 10/22, Professor Christine Photinos‘ article on Paragraph Transitions had been read by over 88,936 people. In turn, Professor Jenna Pack Sheffield’s Using First Person in an Academic Essay: When is It Okay?, has been read by 70,637 people between 1/12 and 10/22.

Our audience is a global community of students, writers, and teachers. Between 2012 and 2023, over 12.7 million students and teachers worldwide have used Writing Commons for help with their writing. 

StudentsInstructors/FacultyWorking Professionals
Our target audience is undergraduate students in writing courses in the U.S. and abroad, particularly undergraduate courses in academic, business, and technical writing.College & University Faculty.
Knowledge Workers in workplace, academic, and public contexts.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be sent in .doc or .docx files. You may include videos or images to supplement the text; please submit video links or .mp4s, and all images as .jpeg or .png. Also, feel free to include hyperlinks to other sources that might be useful for students.

For citation, we use Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th Edition.

Your submission

  • should be saved as a .doc or .docx file with any images saved as .jpeg or .png format. Please name files according to the following conventions: “Title of webtext.”
  • should be 750-1000 words in length
  • should be free of internal references to the author’s identity.
  • should include a brief cover letter introducing your webtext and its title; you might use this letter to voice any concerns/questions you have about the text.

If you are submitting podcasts, videos, or composing a multi-page hyperlinked text (which we strongly encourage), please e-mail Cassandra Branham (branhac1@erau.edu) directly for specific directions.

Suggestions for Colleagues

Prior to pitching an article idea, we encourage you to take a moment to learn about Writing Commons. Visit the Site Map or use Search to check out whether we already have an article on your proposed topic.

New Articles

For the fall semester 2023, we are especially interested in works that focus on the following topics:

  • AI (History of AI; Experiments with different AI authoring tools)
  • Academic Freedom
  • Climate Change
  • Evidence
  • Free Speech
  • Persuasion
  • Reasoning

Revisions or Edits to Existing Articles

At Writing Commons, we are aware of a good many pages that need major rewrites. We are open to handling these rewrites as entirely new articles. Some pages that are particularly urgent to revise include

Ancillary Materials for New Articles

We are open to publishing materials that amplify existing pages. For instance, we would love to see some videos on keywords defined @ Writing Commons.

Peer Review

Evidence based policy after peer review by John Englart Takver is licensed under CC BY SA 20

Once we receive your article and confirm it matches our needs, we will begin the peer-review process. Articles will be reviewed by at least two members of the staff, review editors, or editorial board. You will then receive our decision to publish as is, publish with revisions, or reject.

We try to have a quick turnaround time with our peer-review process. From initial submission to notification of the submission status, please allow approximately four weeks. If you don’t hear from us by then, please do shoot us a reminder. Thanks!

Publishing Agreement

Prior to publication, following peer review and acceptance, authors are required to complete our

  1. Submission Form
  2. Publishing Agreement Form.

Suggestion

Before beginning your project, we encourage you to submit a brief proposal to our Co-Editors-in-Chief:

Cassandra Branham
Associate Professor
Director, Center for Communication and Digital Media
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Cassandra.Branham@erau.edu

Megan McIntyre
Assistant Professor
Director, Program in Rhetoric and Composition
University of Arkansas
mm250@uark.edu