Contribute

Please help us help others communicate more effectively in school and work contexts. Join us as editors and writers. Let us know what we’re doing right and what you’d like us to do.

See Also
About |Staff | Review Editors | Advisory Board | Author Bios

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Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to Writing Commons (see About).

Please consider joining our community as

• critics
• editors
• writers
• visonaries.

As writers, we view Writing Commons to be a work in progress. We have been working away on this project since 2008. Now, we realize some of our earlier articles need updating. Plus, we also realize we’ve barely scratched the surface on numerous topics at Writing Commons.

Be a Critic

We sincerely welcome criticism. Please share your suggestions for improving Writing Commons:

• Let us know if you notice any problems with existing articles.
• Let us hear your ideas for new ways to help students and writers in workplace contexts.
• Help us see problems with our site navigation and topic organization.

Be an Editor

Some of our 1100+ articles are pretty good. Others still need work. Beyond copyeditors, we need people who can mentor writers who submit good pitches. We’d like to have different editors for all of the major topics at Writing Commons.

Be a Writer

It’s true that most of our articles have been written by professors and doctoral students in Writing Studies, Technical Writing, English Literature, Linguistics, and Rhetoric. However, you don’t have to be a professor to publish with us. You just have to write something smart, something that will help our readers.

Prior to pitching an article to us, please review our published articles.

We are not opposed to multiple articles on the same topic because we know these topics are complex. But if your article is not significantly different it will come under closer scrutiny. We may suggest you revise an earlier piece–just somehow add your content. For that to happen, we would need to work it out with the original author(s).

Composing Processes Collaboration Design Editing Invention Organization Revision Writing with Sources

Courses Genre Information Literacy Mindset Research Rhetoric Style Writing Studies

Call for Articles

Moving forward, we hope to improve the less developed sections of our site, especially Courses and Writing Studies.

Courses

With the launch of the 4th Edition (see About), we aim to publish syllabi and projects at Courses.

Presently we offer links to three new courses:

We gave started this effort by p

Writing Studies

We’ve added Writing Studies with a little trepidation: we worry this section may be a bit too technical for students. We also realize what we’ve presented is still a bit spotty. Still, we are embarking on this journey because we do believe Writing Studies is a thing, and we think that students could benefit from knowing it’s a discipline.

We seek leaders, people who can are well versed in their disciplines and can see ways to tie into what we’re attempting to do in Writing Studies and Writing Commons.

We invite reviews and summaries of current and past research and theory that concerns the study of writing.

We welcome submissions from our colleagues across the disciplines:

• Cognitive Psychology,
• Critical Race Studies
• Education
• Disability Studies
• Human Development (cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal competencies);
• Literacy (Theory & Practice);
• Literature.
• Philosophy,
• Rhetoric;
• Technology
• Writing Pedagogy
• Neurology & Writing.

Audience

Writing Commons is used by both professionals in workplace contexts and students in undergraduate composition, business, STEM/Technical Writing, and creative writing courses. About 30% of our traffic resides in the U.S.

Screenshot Date: 12/31/19

Students		Instructors/Faculty	Working Professionals
Our primary audience is undergraduate students in writing courses in the U.S., particularly undergraduate courses in academic, business, and technical writing courses.		College & University Faculty. (About 70% of users reside in the U.S.)	About one third of our audience is comprised of independent scholars and professionals.

Submission Guidelines

Before beginning your project, we encourage you to submit a brief proposal to

Dr. Sandy Branham, Editor in Chief
branhac1@erau.edu

Submissions should be sent in .doc or .docx files. You can include videos or images to supplement the text; please submit video links or .mp4s, and all images as .jpeg or .png. You can include hyperlinks to other sources that might be useful for students, including, but not limited to, other Writing Commons articles. 

For citation, we prefer MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (8th ed.) However, given our efforts to be interdisciplinary, we accept other citation systems, especially APA.

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.
  • For information about how to remove author credentials in Word, please see this link. 
• 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.

Peer Review

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.

Because webtexts are more concise than traditional academic essays, we endeavor to have a quick turn-around time. From initial submission to notification of the submission’s status, please allow approximately four weeks.

Publishing Agreement

Prior to publication, following peer review, authors are required to complete our Publishing Agreement.