Submissions

Submission Guidelines

Xchanges is an international peer-reviewed journal that features original research from undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Technical Communication, Writing and Rhetoric, and Writing Across the Curriculum (ISSN: 1558-6456).

Check out our ISSUE 19.1 SPECIAL CALL FOR PAPERS: Graduate Teaching Symposium. Proposals are due June 30, 2024.

General Call for Papers

This year Xchanges journal is excited to announce the introduction of two new categories of submissions. As usual, we invite submissions of undergraduate and graduate research articles; but we are also inviting two new types of submissions: (1) an undergraduate and graduate special features submission and (2) a retrospectives submission for in-field academics. Our hope with these new submissions is to create more on-ramps for student scholarship. More detailed information on the three types of submission is below.

For questions regarding submission to Xchanges please email the editorial team at xchangesjournal@gmail.com.

Xchanges accepts submissions on a continuously rolling basis (this is a change from our previous approach, a static submission window). If you have scholarly work you would like considered for an upcoming undergraduate issue (published each fall) or graduate-student issue (published each spring) of Xchanges, follow the detailed instructions below. We look forward to considering your work for an upcoming issue!

Submissions should be sent to xchangesjournal@gmail.com, and should do the following:

In the subject line, please use the following conventions: "Xchanges submission, undergraduate" or "Xchanges submission, graduate."
In the body of your email, include the title of your submission, the faculty member with whom you worked on this project (if relevant), and the university in which you are enrolled.
Confirm that your manuscript is not under consideration and has not been previously published elsewhere. If it has been previously published elsewhere, provide a full citation with link to or pdf copy of the previous publication, and explain how the current manuscript represents a significant expansion, revision, or remediation (composed using different media) of the previous publication.
If you are a graduating Senior, be sure to include an email address that is not your university email address.

General Guidelines

Xchanges accepts submissions in "traditional" journal-article format and as “webtexts.” The form of an author’s text should be at once comprehensible, innovative, and appropriate to the information the author is presenting. Text-based (“traditional”) submissions should be sent as Word attachments (".docx" format) and should conform to either MLA or APA style. Authors of webtexts should check for cross-browser compatibility and should make all efforts to ensure that links are functional and that markup is clean. "Traditional" article submissions should be "article-length," which typically means between 15 and 25 pages. All submissions must be free of the author's name in the document or multi-media text itself, for the purpose of anonymous review.

We hope undergraduate students, in particular, who are considering submitting to Xchanges will bear in mind that we do not publish research papers on subjects unrelated to the Writing Studies disciplines. We publish work that engages with and supplements current research in the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, composition, Writing Across the Curriculum, and writing center administration and tutoring. We know that many students in first-year writing classes and seminars complete final analytic research papers on a variety of subjects that galvanize debate in our culture. Yet, these types of papers are not the kinds of scholarly studies that deal specifically with practices of writing and argumentation that we seek to publish in Xchanges, however interesting or well written these first-year Writing course papers might be. It is a good idea for undergraduate students who are interested in submitting their work to Xchanges to peruse our past undergraduate issues, to get a sense of the level and focus of scholarship we have published in the past.

All researchers whose studies involve human subjects -- from survey participants to interviewees -- must have completed the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process, and received approval, at their home institution. This applies to both undergraduate and graduate-student submissions. The IRB status of the project ("approved") must be mentioned in the submission.

We do not allow simultaneous submission. If you wish to submit your work to Xchanges for review, your work cannot be under review at another journal. This is standard -- if often unspoken -- protocol for scholarly journals, largely because the extensive amount of labor that goes into peer review is prohibitive of considering a manuscript that might be pulled at some point during the review process. Similarly, because the purpose of publishing research is to advance the field's understanding, we do not publish work that has been previously published in another journal, unless the work has been significantly expanded, remixed, or remediated (composed using different media, e.g. converted into an interactive webtext from a static-text predecessor). In such rare cases, the new Xchanges publication will bear notification that the publication was published in a prior form in another journal, and a full citation with hyperlink to that journal will be included.

Submissions to Xchanges are evaluated by the journal editor and the review board. Texts published in Xchanges are listed in MLA International Bibliography. Authors whose texts are selected will be required to submit a brief biographical statement.

Article Submission

Every year, Xchanges publishes two issues: our fall issue highlights upper-level undergraduate research and the spring issue features graduate student (MA and PhD) research.

As the 2023-24 academic year kicks off, we invite rolling submissions for original student research—both graduate and undergraduate—on the following topics:

writing studies theory • writing pedagogy • rhetorical analyses
writing-in-the disciplines • professional writing • business writing
technical communication • digital rhetoric • writing center studies

At Xchanges we recognize and value the many ways of meaning making across the field and therefore invite submissions that employ a variety of methodologies including, but not limited to: empirical research, ideological analyses, feminist methods, narrative methods, (auto)ethnographic research, user experience, rhetorical criticism and more.

Submission Guidelines
Articles submissions are accepted on a rolling-basis, should represent original research, and adhere the following guidelines:

5,000-7,000 words (including Works Cited)
Include IRB-approval if the project includes human subjects
Anonymized for peer-review

Special Feature Submissions

Xchanges is committed to promoting rigorous academic scholarship; we also recognize that serious inquiry can take many forms beyond that of the traditional research paper. Therefore, we are excited to issue a call for undergraduate and graduate submissions to our new “Special Features” section. Submissions to this section of the journal should be shorter than full research articles (1,500-2000 words) but must still reflect the practices and values associated with responsible scholarly activity.

Student writing submitted to the “Special Features” section may cover a range of subject matter related to writing studies and technical writing, but we are especially interested in student writing related to the intersections of undergraduate writing and social justice. Students may want to consider the following question:

How does writing inform, contribute to, or undermine efforts (either social or institutional) toward diversity, equity, and inclusion?

Submissions to this section of the journal may use empirical research methods, but can also employ more accessible methods such as autoethnographies, testimonios, narrative research, and rhetorical criticism.

Submission Guidelines
Special Feature submissions are accepted on a rolling-basis, should represent original writing, and adhere the following guidelines:

1,500-2,000 words (including Works Cited)
Anonymized for peer-review

Faculty Retro/Perspectives

Faculty members, Xchanges wants to hear from you! More specifically, we think our undergraduate and graduate writers want to hear from you about your experiences as an academic and a writer. The “Faculty Retro/Perspectives” is a new section of the journal dedicated to publishing faculty retrospectives related to researching and writing. As a starting point, faculty might want to consider “things I wish I had known” about writing, researching, and publishing.

Submissions to this section of the journal should be brief (1000 words maximum) and be aimed at helping apprentice young scholars into the fields of writing studies and technical writing.

Submission Guidelines
Faculty Retro/Perspectives will be editorially reviewed and accepted on a rolling-basis. They should represent original writing, and adhere the following guidelines:

1,000 words maximum
Non-anonymized for transparency and contextualization