As part of the WAC Clearinghouse family of open-access publications, we use the Clearinghouse submissions portal to review and provide feedback on submissions. You can find the portal at https://submissions.colostate.edu.
The editors have compiled the list of considerations below in order to help you prepare your manuscript for submission.
Is your essay appropriate for WLN?
Our readers turn to the WLN for insights and strategies they can consider in their scholarship and in their own centers, which can include highly varied programs at universities, colleges, high schools, and middle schools in the U.S. and writing centers in other countries.
Successful essays will demonstrate some level of writing center experience, as opposed to theoretical programs, policies, or solutions that have been thought about but never tested in real writing center settings. On the other hand, essays that are predominantly focused on classroom theory and practice or other non-writing center topics may be more successful if sent to more appropriate journals.
Does your essay offer new insights, experience, or research?
Essays that are primarily repeating what is already known are not appropriate for publication. WLN does not publish literature reviews at this time.
Does your essay offer some context or background of previous scholarship and what is known about the subject?
Just as there can be too much context, essays are not suitable for publication when they offer no clear awareness of the existing scholarship. If your essay acknowledges what others have written about a subject, please ensure that your citations are up-to-date with recent sources.
Does your essay avoid jargon that assumes readers are familiar with this specialized terminology?
Readers of WLN range from those new to the field to experienced directors. Your goal as an author should be to educate newcomers and add to the knowledge of experienced directors. As a general rule, WLN considers good ideas expressed in clear, straightforward language to be preferable to good ideas hidden under a layer of jargon that only a limited number of readers are familiar with.
Does your Works Cited conform to the 9th edition (2021) of the MLA Handbook?
Fixing errors, missing information in citations, and other problems are the responsibility of the author. Please include a hyperlinked DOI when available.
What kinds of submissions will NOT be considered?
Is your essay approximately 3,000 words or your Tutors' Column approximately 1,500 words, including Works Cited and Notes?
For many years, WLN required submissions to be 3,000 words for articles and 1,500 words for Tutors' Columns. Now the journal is online, we continue to be committed to publishing articles and columns within these word count limits. We may be willing to extend a word count by about 100 words when it seems appropriate.
Tutors sending essays for the Tutors' Column are encouraged to discuss how to write successful essays for publication--not successful class papers--with their directors. These are two very different genres.
WLN invites submissions from newcomers, experienced scholars, and tutors from all over the globe. All voices are important in our collaborative world.
While WLN does not accept unsolicited book reviews; rather, we invite suggestions for books you are interested in reviewing. We also welcome queries in advance about possible articles.
Before submitting a manuscript, be sure that your manuscript complies with the requirements below.
The editors assume that authors whose research involves human subjects have obtained the approval of the IRB at their institution before submitting an essay to this journal reporting on that research.
Please submit your manuscript on our submissions portal at https://submissions.colostate.edu
For more information about submitting to this and other journals, please see the Clearinghouse invitation to contribute scholarly work, its statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and its statement on publication ethics. Submissions and peer reviews should be informed by these statements. Our peer review process is also expected to be guided by the statement on anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices, which can be found at https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic.
Like other publications on the Clearinghouse, articles in our journal are released under Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow authors to retain copyright to their work. To learn more about these licenses, please view the Clearinghouse's Creative Commons Licenses page.
WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship is an open-access, peer-review scholarly journal, published on the WAC Clearinghouse and supported by Colorado State University. Copyright © for the journal is held by its editorial staff. Articles are published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs).