Editorial Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in writing for Politics Today. This document serves as a guide to ensure the best possible chance of your article being accepted.

Please note the following:

We suggest that you re-read your article at least two or three times before submitting it. This is so that you can correct obvious spelling and grammatical errors, which may not be picked up by spellcheck. Moreover, this will you give you the opportunity to ensure that your work is well structured and your ideas well-formed and clear.

Please read the guidelines below – we appreciate it when you follow these criteria before submitting as it ensures a smooth and effective process that values everyone’s time, as well as consistency in the way our articles are presented.

Politics Today reserves the right to make editorial and stylistic changes to all articles we publish. All revisions will be shared with the author.

Content and Format

The word limit on articles is between 1,000-1,200 words. Please try not to exceed this amount.

Articles must be factually correct and have a clear argument or opinion that offers a new or interesting perspective on a given subject.

Articles must be issue-related and adhering to understand structural changes in global politics, and/or should be covering foreign policy issues in a specific way. They ought to be relevant to contemporary issues and up-to-date discussions.

Avoid technical details and jargon where possible, to ensure clear communication, as we have a wide-ranging readership.

Overall an engaging language style is required to ensure our articles appeal to a broad audience.

Try to keep a high keyword density in your article. If possible, consider using these keywords in your title.

If you believe that your article requires subtitles, please consider using them. This will make your article easier to read.

Please supply a short author photo and a biography at the end.

Fact Checking

Politics Today is committed to giving our readers accurate and up-to-date analyses to ensure our credibility as a news-analysis source. As such, authors submitting articles need to ensure that references to external news sources, incidents, events, historical facts etc. are hyperlinked within the article in order for the Politics Today editorial board to verify them.

Concrete facts like dates, people’s titles, names, distances, and addresses need to be verified by the author by using standard references like official websites. It is especially important to check the spellings of people’s names.

Language

Language: US English

Grammar

Ensure that your grammatical tenses are consistent throughout the piece and that a sentence does not accidentally change tense halfway through.

People should always be referred to using the pronoun “who” (not “that”).

Please avoid using the passive voice wherever possible.

Punctuation

Quotation marks should be double (“ ”) and not single (‘ ’) unless you are quoting within a quotation or in the title of the article. False starts and extraneous syllables like ‘umm’ should be omitted.

When the name ends with “s” and requires a possessive apostrophe, we use Abbas’s, Hamas’s etc.

Country abbreviations such as U.S. and U.K. need full stops after each letter.

Other than country abbreviations, when using one for the first time, please specify the full name before the abbreviation in brackets e.g. Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). After that if the name is repeated in the text, the abbreviation should be used.

Style

Official job titles or positions, such as president, prime minister, secretary of state etc., should be lower case and make use of commas unless followed immediately by the incumbent’s name and used as a proper noun.

Numbers from one to nine should be written out unless referring to time and date or preceded by a currency symbol. Numbers 10 and above should be numerical: 100 and 1,000… and 10,000 and 100,000 (Not 100 thousand) until you reach one million, two million, nine million, 11 million, 12 million…

Numbers starting a sentence should always be spelt out e.g. Five hundred people attended the conference.

Please use the metric system for all units of distance (centimeters, meters and kilometers) and weight (grams, kilograms, etc.).

Percentages are to be denoted as “%” if in the title of an article and in all other cases as “per cent.”

Choose your words carefully, as the language we use makes a difference.

When quoting a source in your submission, whether it is an individual, a report or an official, please keep it as short, brief and simple as possible in order to better communicate the scope of the source’s message.

Writing dates

Dates should be written as follows: July 15, 2016.

We follow the month-day-year format in which commas are placed after the day and year. Dates should be written as follows:

Writing the month and day in a text: John was born on May 25.

Writing the month, day and year: On May 25, 2000, John was born

Writing centuries

The century should be in numerals without an apostrophe ‘s’: Women often wore long dresses in the 1900s.

Writing the Decade

The decade should be in numerals without an apostrophe ‘s’: My sister was born in the 1990s

Where to submit

Please email articles to (submit [at] politicstoday.org).

For security reasons, do not attach articles in the form of a word document; rather paste them into the body of the email. We try to reply to every submission, however sometimes we are unable to do this during busy times. If you do not hear from us within two working days, please remind us through another email.

Payments

An honorarium is paid to the authors. All submissions must be original and exclusive to Politics Today. If the submitted article is published elsewhere before, an honorarium is not paid to the author.