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Guidelines for contributors

  1. Manuscripts submitted to English Text Construction (ETC) must be written in clear, concise, grammatical English. If not written by a native speaker, it is advisable to have the paper checked by a native speaker.

  2. Article length may vary, but is usually between 7,000 and 12,000 words. Book reviews should be between 1,500 and 3,000 words long and should provide a summary of the book as well as the reviewer's evaluation of it.

  3. All articles published in ETC are anonymously peer-reviewed. Submissions to ETC are handled via ETC's Editorial Manager page: https://www.editorialmanager.com/etc. The file format may be .doc, .docx or .rtf. The first page should contain the title of the article (capitalize only the first word of the title and, if applicable, of the subtitle, and proper names); the name, affiliation, address and e-mail address of each author; a self-contained abstract of max. 120 words; and a list of up to five keywords, separated by a comma, listed in alphabetical order, and not capitalized. Revised versions of submissions will likewise need to be submitted via the website, accompanied by a revision report in cases where the verdict returned was "revise and resubmit".

  4. Authors are responsible for observing copyright laws when quoting or reproducing material. The copyright of articles published in ETC is held by the publisher. Permission for the author to use the article elsewhere will be granted by the publisher provided full acknowledgment is given to the source.

  5. Papers should be reasonably divided into sections and, if appropriate, subsections. The headings of these subsections should be numbered in Arabic numerals (1; 1.1; 1.1.1). Numbering starts at 1, not 0. Sections and subsections should be titled, capitalizing only the first word of the title (and, if applicable, subtitle) and proper names.

  6. Spelling should be British English or American English and should be consistent throughout the paper.

  7. Line drawings or photographs should be submitted as reproducible originals and be referred to as Figures. Figures and Tables should be numbered consecutively throughout the paper and have appropriate captions. They should always be referred to in the text itself, using numbers (e.g. 'as indicated in Table 1'), and not expressions such as 'the following table' or 'the figure below'. Tables and Figures should be inserted in their preferred position in the text.

  8. Example sentences should be numbered consecutively throughout the article, and the numbers should be placed in brackets.

  9. Notes should appear as footnotes and should be concise, kept to a minimum, and be numbered consecutively throughout the paper. Footnote numbers should be inserted after punctuation marks such as commas and full stops.

  10. Quoted passages should be enclosed in double quotation marks. Use single quotation marks for quotations within quotations. Punctuation marks such as full stops, commas, colons and semicolons immediately following quoted passages should appear outside the quotation. Quotes longer than four lines should be formatted as a block quote (indented, with a blank line before and after, and no quotation marks). In-text references should follow the style (Traugott & Dasher 2002: 147-148). In the case of multiple references listed consecutively, references should be ordered chronologically; they should be separated by a semicolon, except for publications by the same author(s), which should be separated by a comma (Hyland 2000; Flowerdew 2005, 2008). In the case of multiple authors, use 'et al.' for publications with three or more authors.

  11. The References section should list in alphabetical order all references cited in the text and only these. Note the following examples (and in particular the use of full first names, with the possible exception of authors who use initials only):

    Books
    Athanasiadou, Angeliki, Costas Canakis & Bert Cornillie (eds). 2006. Subjectification: Various Paths to Subjectivity (Cognitive Linguistics Research 31). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
    Hasselgård, Hilde, Jarle Ebeling & Signe Oksefjell Ebeling (eds). 2013. Corpus Perspectives on Patterns of Lexis (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 57). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
    Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

    Articles
    Hinkel, Eli. 2003. Adverbial markers and tone in L1 and L2 students writing. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (7): 1049-1068.
    McLeod, Deborah. 2009. Disturbing the silence: Sound imagery in Conrad's The Secret Agent. Journal of Modern Literature 33 (1): 117-131.
    Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1995. Subjectification in grammaticalization. In Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives, Dieter Stein & Susan Wright (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31-54.

    Conference talks and dissertations
    Horn, Laurence R. 2011. Uncrypting a cryptotype: Lexical semantics, lexical pragmatics, and the un-verb. Plenary lecture given at the 4th International Conference of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Eduction "Facing Present, Past and Future", Brussels, 1-3 December 2011.
    Van Dam, Frederik. 2013. The man without style: Victorian liberalism and literary form in Anthony Trollope's later novels. PhD dissertation, University of Leuven.

    Web page references should include a URL and be followed by a last accessed date between round brackets.

    For more examples, see this example of a reference list published in ETC.

  12. The main text of the article can be followed by the following sections (in this order): Acknowledgements, Primary data (i.e. literary source texts or linguistic corpora used), References, Appendices. Appendices, if present, should be numbered consecutively and referred to in the main text.

  13. Authors will receive electronic proofs sent by e-mail for final corrections. These must be returned by the dates determined by the publication schedule. Authors will receive one copy of the journal issue upon publication.