These guidelines provide general instructions on preparing material for the IJTC. For more specific advice, please e-mail the IJTC editor.

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Please discuss your article ideas with the editor. We welcome submissions from all sources, on any topic of interest to our audience of technical communicators.

Contributing to the Journal

The IJTC editor can provide you with Contributor-level access to the publishing platform, to enable you to create articles and format the content of the article. This is a one-time event and you will receive an email about this change in your membership status.

When your article is ready, you can submit it to the editor for review and publishing.

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For information on our House Style and how to write, see our Style Guidelines.

Drafting and publication steps

Articles must be coordinated with the IJTC editor.

  1. Agree with the editor the subject matter for the article.
  2. The editor can provide you with Contributor-level access to our publishing platform, together with instructions on how to use the platform.
  3. When you receive an email notification, click the link to sign up and access the platform.
  4. Complete your draft article and submit for review.
    (Note: alternatively, the editor may upload the article for you, if you have this in an alternative format, such as Word, Open Office or HTML.)
  5. The editor will review your work and make updates or give you suggestions.
  6. The article may go back and forth between the editor and contributor until both parties are happy with the article.
  7. The article is then published, and a notification is sent to subscribers.

Articles in the IJTC are copyright and are the property of the authors, who have asserted their moral rights.

Note #1: Where the IJTC or a member society has paid for commissioned content, the copyright will be deemed as transferred to the IJTC or member society.
Note #2: The rules of the International Council for Technical Communication, INTECOM, give member societies (including the ISTC, ASTC and TechCommNZ) the right to reproduce articles from the journals of other member societies. Contributing to the IJTC publication implies acceptance of this rule. Authors must respect other people’s copyright. Give credit for any text or graphics you include; obtain written permission to use anything that is not covered by the ‘fair use’ provision of copyright law.

Use of AI-generated content

Please be aware of potential issues around plagiarism and copyright when using content generated by an AI tool. Make sure you check all sources of information, ask for permissions to reproduce content where relevant, rewrite in your own words and always quote the source of your content.

Note: The editor will review all article submissions for potential copyright and plagiarism issues. Please inform the editor if you have used AI-generated content, so we can make an assessment of its suitability for inclusion in the journal.

Personal profile

You can include an author biography of up to 50 words with articles, for which we need the following:

  • Name (first and last), member grade and any other ‘letters’ to follow your name, e.g. MISTC or FISTC for UK Members/Fellows of ISTC.
  • Professional title and employer if relevant.
  • Credentials for writing the article, such as qualifications, experience and professional involvement.
  • Photo (minimum requirement 150dpi) of the author.
  • Email address if you are willing to be contacted by readers and website URL if available.
  • Blog addresses, Twitter, LinkedIn and Medium accounts if relevant.

Length

There are no length restrictions, but the editor may recommend limiting the size to aid readability. We recommend breaking down lengthy articles into separate articles. As a rough guideline, an article should not be longer than 2000 words.

Structure

Bear in mind the need for visual appeal and readability:

  • Use headings and sub-headings to chunk information; try to avoid the use of more than two heading levels below the main headline.
  • Use lists to structure text; number items where the order is significant, otherwise use bullets; try to avoid more than one level of points within a list.

Formatting

The IJTC is an online journal. We can support basic Markdown and formatting styles, such as headings (2 levels), numbering, bullets, bold and italic.

Please use only basic formatting to convey the structure of your submission and any elements that need to be emphasised:

  • Do not use blank lines and additional spaces to spread out your work. To adjust paragraph spacing, use the settings in your word processor. Use a table structure to space information horizontally.
  • Use UK / British English spelling.
  • Make sure that the number of spaces after a full stop is one.

Illustrations

Where possible, design graphics to illustrate text; this is especially important in articles explaining how to do a task or use a tool.

For diagrams, use a sans serif typeface, lower case letters for annotations and bold text for highlighting specific elements. Reference all graphics from the text, explaining their significance, and place the references before the graphics.

If you can create graphics yourself, use a common online format such as .PNG or .JPG.

If you want to use photographs, supply sharp copyright-free images suitable for publication.

Screenshots

If you include screenshots, treat them differently from photographic images:

  • Prior to taking a screenshot, please change your Appearance settings to the default style for your operating system to remove any personalised text or window effects;
  • Save in PNG format with CMYK colour;
  • Do not adjust the resolution, unless requested by the editor;
  • Do not resample; that is, do not artificially remove or add any pixels.
  • Do not encode a file with an indexed or subset colour palette, unless your image editing application provides the option to use a Selective/Perceptual palette (this avoids the introduction of noise, artefacts and banding into the image)
  • Do remember that the IJTC is an online journal, so avoid images of very large size.

Videos

We can include links to videos hosted on the usual websites (Yahoo / Vimeo). Include a link to where your video is hosted.

References

Quoting your sources enhances the credibility of your writing and enables readers to research a topic further. The IJTC uses the Harvard system for referencing. When you reference a work, you can do it in one of three ways:

  • Denscombe (1998) states that the Harvard system is more commonplace these days.
  • The Harvard system is used more widely than the alternative numerical system (Denscombe 1998).
  • It has been stated that ‘the Harvard system … is more commonplace these days’ (Denscombe 1998: 228). Giving a page number (as in the third example) enables readers to check exactly what your source wrote on the subject.

Present your list of references as follows: Denscombe, M (1998) The Good Research Guide for small-scale social research projects. Boston. Allyn & Bacon.

For articles, include both the title of the article and the name of the journal in which it was published:
Raison, B (2000) ‘ILS and the motor industry’, Communicator, Winter 2000: 28.

You may also want to give contact details for organisations mentioned in your article.

Online references are cited in a similar way but with the addition of a URL and access date: Nielsen J (1997) Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, March, 1997; ‘Be Succinct!’ (online) available at www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html (accessed August 2002)