Thank you so much for writing for The Australian Geologist (TAG)!
Here’s what to think about when you write your article. Following this guide as best as you can will mean fewer edits to review.
VOICE
TAG is a magazine for Earth Scientists, by Earth Scientists. This means you’ll be talking to colleagues and peers, so it’s fine to include a little jargon and technical language.
HOWEVER, is it critical to remember that this is a magazine, not a journal. We do not want readers to feel like they are working when they sit down with your article. It should be a leisurely read, that will interest a broad Earth Science audience. The language should:
• Be casual and colloquial. Write it the way you’d discuss interesting research or an interesting fact with a colleague from unrelated department. Imagine you’re a geochemist talking to a palaeontologist. If they have to ask, “what does that mean?”, then simplify your language or define your jargon in a simple, concise way.
• Be personal, emotive, and active. I encourage you to use first-person perspective to facilitate more active, not passive, sentences. Research wasn’t done by you. You did the research.
• Avoid acronyms and symbols. If you use a phrase only once or twice, no need to use an acronym. More than that? Pop the acronym in parentheses after the first mention. Please spell out units of measurement. For example, write “square kilometres” not “km2”, write “approximately” or “roughly” instead of ~.
• Be evidence-based. Please draw from research papers that were published recently (in the last five years). Please don’t write references. Instead, you can hyperlink to places where you sourced information throughout your article. This will help me immensely with fact checki ng.
STRUCTURE
Your article should have the following elements:
• An interesting hook. What will grab your readers attention? This could be, for example, a description of a location, a bold statement, a relatable sentiment or a short anecdote.
• What’s your point? Summarise your contention in a maximum of three sentences somewhere in the first three paragraphs of your article.
• Relevant, broader context. For example, can you connect your article with something happening in the news? Can you mention other papers that might have differing views to you? Or can you apply this to the rest of Australia?
• Examples! Lots of them! If your article was a biscuit, examples would be the choc chips.
• A selection of photos. High resolution, ideally with a person in them. They don’t have to be professional quality. Please send them as email attachments or via file transfer, not within a word doc as this reduces the quality of the image.
Any questions? Contact us at tag@gsa.org.au