Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • Please indicate which course and instructor you wrote this paper for.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  • The text is single-spaced or 1.5 line-spaced; uses an 11- or 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format. Please do not submit a PDF as this makes the editorial process difficult.
  • The submission includes three to six keywords that reflect the content of the text.
  • Where available, DOIs and URLs for the references have been provided.
  • If submitting to a peer-reviewed section, the submission has been blinded as per the instructions in the Author Guidelines.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another publication for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • Authors have secured all necessary copyright permissions for the use of 3rd-party materials in their manuscript. Authors will be required to provide written evidence of these permission upon acceptance.
  • The submission adheres to the journal's Code of Ethics for Authors detailed on the About the Journal page.

Author Guidelines

Overview

Writing Across the University of Alberta (WAUA) publishes undergraduate and graduate student writing from Writing Studies courses and courses focused on writing studies practices and scholarship at the University of Alberta. Texts explore any topic of interest to the discipline of Writing Studies and to work in Writing Studies courses. The journal is edited and published by instructors and students in Writing Studies courses at the University of Alberta.

Writing Studies instructors will encourage students to submit suitable texts to the journal. If a student has written a text that they believe to be suitable, they should discuss their intention to submit it to the journal with their instructor. Their instructor may suggest additional revisions to your text in order to improve it.

Due to time and budgetary constraints, the journal will only consider submissions from Writing Studies courses at this time. We may expand the scope of the journal to include writing from other courses in the future.

Preparing your text for submission

To prepare your text for submission, you should:

  • Revise it carefully based on feedback from your fellow students and instructor in your Writing Studies class.

  • Ensure that your text is free from grammar and punctuation errors.

  • Include three to six keywords that identify the important content of the text.

  • Format your document as a Word or RTF file. We can only accept PDF files if the submission is primarily visual, like a meme.

  • Use 11- or 12-point Arial or Times New Roman font. Texts should use single-spacing or 1.5 spacing. You may use this template to format your document for submission.

  • Use the Modern Language Association (MLA) or American Psychological Association (APA) citation style. 

  • Include DOIs and URLs for references whenever possible. You can find instructions on how to use DOIs here.

  • Include copyright permission for any 3rd-party material used in the submission such as photos or videos. You can find information on how to request copyright permission from a content owner here. 

  • If you used Generative AI tools like ChatGPT to generate parts of your text, please acknowledge this in your submission. Using Generative AI to generate ideas, outlines, or early drafts does not need to be acknowledged as long as the piece has been revised substantially.
  • To ensure a blind peer review: 
    • Remove any identifying information from the title or title page, including the author’s name and the course number and section.
    • Remove any identifying information from footnotes, endnotes, or the bibliography.
    • Remove any identifying information on figures and tables, including figure and table labels and captions.
    • Do not include acknowledgments or refer to your classmates or instructor by name in your text. 
    • Remove any identifying information from file names.
    • Ensure document properties, which are embedded in the file, are also anonymized. You can find instructions on how to do so with Microsoft Office files here.

If your text is accepted for publication, you will be asked to complete the Author Agreement and to choose whether you wish to publish your text under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0) or another Creative Commons license.

Introduction

This section includes an introduction and comments from the editorial team.

Undergraduate Student Writing

This section invites student writing from writing studies courses across campus. Texts may be up to 5000 words in length and may explore any topic of interest to writing studies and writing in general. Multimedia elements may be included; however, the author must ensure that copyright permission is not required or has been obtained for all multimedia elements and that multimedia elements are suitable to be published in PDF files. Note that there may also be technical constraints that limit the publication of complex multimedia compositions.

Privacy Statement

The data collected from registered and non-registered users of this journal falls within the scope of the standard functioning of peer-reviewed journals. It includes information that makes communication possible for the editorial process; it is used to inform readers about the authorship and editing of content; it enables collecting aggregated data on readership behaviors, as well as tracking geopolitical and social elements of scholarly communication. 

This journal’s editorial team and its hosting service, the University of Alberta Libraries, use this data to guide their work in publishing and improving this journal. Data that will assist in developing this publishing platform may be shared with its developer Public Knowledge Project in an anonymized and aggregated form, with appropriate exceptions such as article metrics. The data will not be sold by this journal, the University of Alberta Libraries, or PKP nor will it be used for purposes other than those stated here. The authors published in this journal are responsible for the human subject data that figures in the research reported here. 

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Those involved in editing this journal seek to be compliant with industry standards for data privacy, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provision for “data subject rights” that include (a) breach notification; (b) right of access; (c) the right to be forgotten; (d) data portability; and (e) privacy by design. The GDPR also allows for the recognition of “the public interest in the availability of the data,” which has a particular saliency for those involved in maintaining, with the greatest integrity possible, the public record of scholarly publishing.