In summary, articles may be submitted only by registered users, so start by joining the site.

No compensation is paid for articles.

All articles submitted and accepted for publication become the shared property of the author and ESL Journal. Articles must be original, but we do not assert copyright, and you may republish your article in other venues. You must tell us if your article has been previously published, regardless of re-editing or versioning. We reserve the right to reject or delete previously published articles.

Submit your article as plain text with the attached form. Do not submit articles formatted with a word processor, as the formatting (e.g., boldface, "smart" quotes...) is platform dependent and will be lost.

'Tis the king's English. And as it happens, I'm the king.

And so are you. When you submit an article we will attempt to preserve your style and habits of usage, with minor exceptions dictated by the technical constraints of publishing on the WWW.

Key issues:

Regional variety

In most cases we will retain your punctuation. For example, it is OK to put your periods (full-stops) either inside (US) or outside (UK) your quotation marks, and though we may put your name into our old-fuddy-duddy file we will not substitute while for whilst. We ask only that you be consistent within a single article to keep the editors from tearing out their hair. In fact, these regional variations provide a rich field of study in and of themselves, as the ability to expand one's ears to hear the full range of English is no small task for most learners.

Platform specificity

Characters that are present in one computer system may not be present in all. Some examples include "smart" quotes (which really aren't very smart), long dashes and spaces, section marks, etc.

Text format

Text must be plain, without boldface or italics with very few exceptions. Your meaning must be clear from the words themselves.

Diacritical marks

Accented letters and other diacritical marks will normally carry over correctly, but there are some exceptions for the most esoteric ones from non-Latin 1 character sets.

Once we accept an article we will produce a draft and allow you to proofread it. We will not make the article public until you have done so.

Finally, although we can make a reasonable effort to display your article as intended, please note that this is largely a labor of love and that the time of our volunteer editors is limited. The magazine is published using flexible yet standardized tools that enable us to accommodate a vast but not infinite variety of layouts.

If you wish to help expand our horizons by bringing a sponsor for an article requiring extensive manual configuration, we'd be happy to discuss your individual situation.