Submissions

Author Guidelines

Prompt publishes academic writing assignments for undergraduates or graduate students accompanied by reflective essays. Detailed guidelines for authors follow below.

There are no author fees for submitting or publishing in Prompt. We are a scholar-published, non-profit journal and are not affiliated with any commercial business.

Detailed Guidelines for Authors
We accept open submissions, and all submissions should be submitted through this website. If you have any trouble navigating the online submission process, you can contact our editors at thepromptjournal@gmail.com.

The primary submission file typically includes these elements: title, abstract, reflective essay, acknowledgments (if relevant), assignment, and references. Any figures may be inserted directly within the body of the article. Authors are encouraged to submit a supplementary file that illustrates the assignment as it was formatted for students; they are also encouraged to submit other supplemental materials related to their teaching of the focal assignment (such as rubrics, unit plans, or preparation activities).

Assignment
Submissions should focus on an individual writing assignment used within a college-level context. Please note that we do not publish assignments aimed at pre-college students, including those used in summer bridge or college-bound programs.

Assignments must have been taught to students at least once to be considered. Assignments that have been taught multiple times tend to form the basis for stronger submissions. 

If there are multiple assignments in a course or unit, highlight  the central of most innovative one in your submission to our journal. You may offer details about other relevant course assignments in your reflective essay, including preparation activities or other scaffolding tasks that prepare the student to take on the writing task. If you want to describe a series of assignments that is linked in such a substantive way that it does not make sense to write about only one assignment apart from the others, we recommend that you query the editors before composing a submission for the journal.

We ask contributors to treat the assignment as an artifact that they use the reflective essay to explain. You may lightly revise the assignment in order to make it more legible to an outside reader, but the assignment should not be substantially rewritten. The kinds of revision you might undertake include:

• Adding information that was communicated in class and which is fundamental to understanding the assignment
• Removing departmental or university boilerplate language (e.g. about learning outcomes) that isn’t representative of your own thinking/goals
• Defining terms that your students would know but that a reader of Prompt may not know

The one change we do ask that you make is replacing specific dates with more general markers of time. So, if an assignment happens during the course of the week, you could use Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. If an assignment takes a month to complete, Week 1, Week 2, etc., will be appropriate.

The assignment can be any length--as short or as long as it was when it was presented to students.

The assignment will stand alone and be referenced by the essay through paraphrase and quotation; it should not be embedded in the essay in its entirety. (See previous issues for examples of the presentation of the assignment itself.)

Assignments must have been taught to students at least once to be considered. Assignments that have been taught multiple times tend to form the basis for stronger submissions.

The assignment may be referenced in the reflective essay through paraphrase and quotation, but it should not be embedded within the essay. See previous issues for examples of the presentation and location of the full assignment prompt.

Reflective Essay
A writing assignment needs context to be intelligible and useful to our students, and the same is true when we share assignments with colleagues. Each assignment in Prompt is accompanied by a short essay of 2500-3500 words (not counting references, acknowledgments, titles and sub-titles, and any figures). We prefer initial submissions of less than 3000 words.

The reflective essay genre invites a range of possible approaches and elements, but should consist of both description and reflection. In general, strong essays respond to most or all of the following considerations:

• What are the key ideas and features that characterize this assignment? Keep in mind that many readers will read the essay before examining the assignment itself. The essay should fully introduce the assignment as though the reader is unfamiliar with it. We recommend that the introduction to your essay include a clear, succinct (2-3 sentence) description of the assignment to help orient the reader.
• What were the institutional, disciplinary, and specific course contexts for this assignment? What kinds of students completed the assignment, and what kinds of diversity are reflected among those students?
• How and why did you develop the assignment? Are there precedents, influences, or points of reference you can share? (For authors outside writing studies, we suggest John Bean and Dan Melzer’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom as an accessible text that may help you ground your assignment design in key values, goals, terminology, and debates of writing scholars.)
• What were your approaches to and experiences of teaching the assignment? This may include details of how you scaffolded the assignment inside the classroom, how you coached students to understand and respond to your major expectations, how you integrated review or feedback, or other relevant details of your experience teaching this assignment.
• What is your sense of students’ experiences of undertaking the work of the assignment? What was noteworthy to you about the approaches they took and the work they did? How might students’ differing backgrounds/preparation have affected their response to and success completing the assignment?
• In implementing the assignment in your teaching, what successful outcomes have you seen? What limits do you think the assignment has?
• What future plans, if any, do you have for developing this assignment or adapting it to new contexts?
• How do you imagine that other faculty, potentially including those beyond your field or discipline, might build on the work you have done?
• Optional: What links to any supplementary online material, such as preparatory readings or examples of student writing, did you provide to students to support their engagement with this task?

We invite authors to invest the writing with their own style and to emphasize the elements that are most appropriate for their submission.

Acknowledgments
Authors are welcomed to include an acknowledgements section after the reflective essay, before the assignment prompt and references list. In initial submission, acknowledgements should be restricted to contributions that will not allow for identification of the author. (Authors whose work is accepted for submission may update the acknowledgments to include identifying information at the proofreading stage.)

Style, Format, Documentation

Examine our published essays for examples of the stylistic variety of the essays in the journal. We allow a range of voices (e.g., highly personal, more neutral) to accommodate the writing styles of scholars from across disciplines. We encourage the use of the first person.

Format your in-text citations and references list using the 7th edition of Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (i.e. APA style).

Our editorial style closely follows APA style. We have created a style guide document that contains guidance for authors on commonly asked questions, including on a few matters the APA guide does not directly address. (You may request our style guide by email if you have trouble accessing it online.)

If your submission includes images or other graphics, please provide alternative text to enhance accessibility. Learn more about creating helpful alt text descriptions here. 

We recognize that language, usage, and style are both disciplinary and personal. We are always open to conversations about choices authors would like to make that diverge from our journal’s style.

Abstract

Every submission should have a brief abstract. Please formulate an abstract that communicates: (1) the type of assignment, (2) key intellectual or disciplinary contexts for the assignment, and (3) the novelty or relevance of the assignment.

Sharing Student Writing

While Prompt offers authors a platform to share intellectual work from their teaching, we ask authors to be thoughtful about representing student work publicly. Authors may wish to share excerpts from student writing in their essays. Such excerpts are valuable to our readers, but proper permissions from student authors should be secured. We require authors to either get the student-authors’ written permission to share student writing or to secure formal approval from their institutional research ethics office to share the student writing in a scholarly publication (e.g. through IRB approval).

If your essay includes information or language from student feedback on the course that was collected through recurring institutional processes, such as customary end-of-term course evaluations, these materials may be freely represented and discussed in our journal. If an author has conducted unique, course-specific surveys and is reporting results or sharing excerpts of students’ responses in their essay, they should consult with their university research ethics office to discuss whether additional permissions (such as IRB approval) are required for sharing that information in a publication. 

We do not host sample student essays, but your essay may link to work your students have made public elsewhere.

Plagiarism and Academic Honesty
All ideas, language, data, and visual elements that are not the author's own should be clearly attributed to their sources. If evidence of plagiarism or other scholarly misconduct is brought to the editors' attention, we follow the Commission on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for resolving the issue(s) in a transparent and ethical manner.

Guidance on Joint Authorship
Oftentimes writing prompts are developed collaboratively. They are also sometimes taught collaboratively. In cases where an assignment has been developed and/or taught through a collaboration, the group should jointly decide about whether and how to write about the assignment for publication, and questions of authorship should be openly negotiated. It is not appropriate for an instructor who developed an assignment in collaboration with colleagues to present their work to our editors and readers as though it was their sole intellectual product. Teaching assistants should be considered for authorship if they contributed in a meaningful way to the development and teaching of the assignment.

In cases where a new assignment builds upon the work of a previously existing assignment by another instructor but was not developed in personal collaboration with the previous assignment's author, the author of the source assignment should be given direct and clear credit (e.g., in the text, a footnote, or acknowledgements) for their intellectual work in the author's reflective essay, but co-authorship is not appropriate.

We leave it to authors to decide the order in which authors will be listed, a choice that can be influenced by different disciplinary practices.

Typical Submission Process and Timeline
The publication process can seem mysterious to authors, as journals can have very different editorial practices and timelines. We share below our general process and timeline in the spirit of transparency, so that authors understand our process and can make decisions about submission and revision with this information in mind. We are a scholar-run journal edited by a small team of volunteers, and our practices and timeline reflect this reality.

Initial review. Incoming manuscripts receive an initial, internal review, typically conducted by an associate editor. Manuscripts that are not a fit for the journal (e.g. those which are written for a different audience or purpose than those in our journal or which omit key information relevant to our journal) are declined at this point. Manuscripts that are a good fit for the journal are sent out for peer review after appropriate and available reviewers are located. This process takes 1-2 months, depending on how quickly reviewers are confirmed.

Peer review. Peer reviewers read submissions, make recommendations, and provide feedback to editors/authors. We choose peer reviewers based upon how closely their scholarship and academic interests align with the topic of the submission. When experts in the disciplinary area of the submission are not available to review, we may seek reviewers from our Editorial Board and/or writing across the curriculum experts to serve as reviewers. Authors’ identities are not revealed to reviewers. Reviewers are given the option to sign their reviews or leave them anonymous, which allows us to respect different disciplinary conventions and personal preferences. Reviewers are given 3 weeks to undertake this work. Sometimes, they require extensions, which lengthens the process. Next, editors examine reviews and make final decisions about whether a submission will be declined, moved on to editorial review, or if an author will be asked to revise and resubmit. Editors share a decision and relevant feedback with authors. This process occurs within 2-3 weeks of receiving of reviewers’ reports. If the decision is to ask an author to revise and resubmit, the peer review process is generally repeated when we receive the revised manuscript.

Note: As has been noted in multiple places (e.g., this article in Inside Higher Ed), it is becoming harder for journals to locate peer reviewers. We have also experienced this complication, which makes the peer review process slower than it previously was. We do everything we can to locate peer reviewers in a timely way and to encourage them to meet deadlines we set.

Editorial review, copyediting, and formal acceptance. Once reviewers and editors have approved a submission, the manuscript moves to an editorial review process that can involve an additional round of developmental revision, followed by copyediting. The duration of these stages varies greatly, depending upon the nature of revisions required and the speed of an author’s response.  A well-written manuscript with a responsive author can complete this process in several weeks. Once editorial review is completed, the manuscript is considered to be accepted and forthcoming.

Proofreading. After editorial review is completed, a manuscript is proofread (typically by an editor or associate editor), and authors are asked to review the proofreader’s suggestions. This process takes 2-3 weeks.

Production. At this point, the submission is queued for publication. We publish the journal twice a year, in summer and winter. Articles are generally published in the next issue being published after the proofreading process is complete. Production involves a page proof review by authors.

We understand that the progress of a manuscript toward publication can be stressful and may have a bearing on authors’ tenure and promotion applications, and we take seriously that you have entrusted your work to us for a fair and reasonable review. When needed, we can write letters for an author’s use that indicate the status of a manuscript with our journal.  If the process breaks down for unexpected reasons, we will reach out to you. Our editors welcome questions from authors about the status of a submission at any point in the process. You do not negatively affect your chances of being published by checking in with a query about the status of your submission.

Current Production Schedule
We publish biannually. Our current production schedule may be of interest to prospective authors:


• February 2025, issue 9.1. A regular issue. Submissions received through early 2024 may appear in this issue.
• July/August 2025, issue 9.2. A special issue focused on assignments within the NYU Expository Writing Program. Call for proposals closed January 15, 2024.
• February 2026, issue 10.1. A regular issue. Submissions received after May 2024 and accepted for publication will appear in this or a later issue.
• July 2026, issue 10.2 A special issue, with a restricted call for submissions.
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