Contribution Guidelines
We’re very excited to learn from you! If you work or study in the evaluation field, have hot tips, cool tricks, rad resources or lessons learned of interest to evaluators, and would like to contribute to aea365, please consider submitting a draft contribution. Posts should:
- Be written in first-person prose.
- Be short – approximately 250-400 words and absolutely no more than 450.
- Focus on topics that will be of interest to a range of evaluators, not just on the work that you are doing.
- At the very beginning, include a 1-3 sentence introduction to you and the general theme of your Tips, Trick, Resources, or Lessons Learned (but, you don’t have a lot of space and this isn’t all about you – keep it short and focused)
- For each Tip, Trick, Resource or Lesson Learned, include a header (Hot Tip, Cool Trick Rad Resource, or Lesson Learned) and then a description and how it’s useful.
- Include an active weblink to the Tip, Trick, Resource or Lesson Learned (where appropriate).
- Avoid self-promotion.
- Avoid jargon and acronyms, spelling out items the first time that they appear.
- Include a relevant image (chart, photo, data visualization, illustration) for which you have use permission, as appropriate (an image makes the post pinnable on Pinterest and often adds explanatory value and/or visual appeal).
- NOT use APA or other citation style meant for hardcopy documents, rather embed links to online resources directly within the narrative and for resources that are offline, use prose to describe such as “I found Smith and Jone’s recent article on Making Amazing Stuff More Amazing in the Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Great Thoughts to be useful in laying out a step-by-step plan.”
To get a feel for the breadth and style of contributions, take a look at the archives via the archive link at the top of this page.
Send your draft post in an email for consideration to aea365@eval.org. Please note that we reserve the right to refuse submissions and to edit submissions for length and alignment with the style of aea365 – you’ll always have the opportunity to review and approve any edits.
Bloggers Series: Susan Kistler on Writing Weekly for aea365 - AEA365 · December 24, 2011 at 3:56 am
[...] Contribution Guidelines [...]
David McDonald · January 14, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Thanks Susan. Since it is the American Eval Assoc, and most members are from the USA and would know the term, and contributors are briefed on what goes in which sections, I don’t see any need to change it. Not too informal or radical to me!
Though it is an odd use of the English language to define ‘radical’ as not meaning radical but something else entirely! Here in Australia something similar has happened with ‘awesome’, with the term being used colloquially to mean something like ‘excellent’.
Cheers – David
Admin comment by Susan Kistler · January 13, 2010 at 7:35 pm
US slang – in a positive sense – short for radical.
I looked it up and found the following at http://onlineslangdictionary.com/definition+of/rad
Rad: “cool neat nice good ect. Origin: From the word radical.”
Rad: “Very good, excellent, great. Short form for the word radical.”
Perhaps too informal here?
David McDonald · January 13, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Hi, I’m finding these very interesting and appreciate the overnight Twitter alerts. One thing, though: what, pray, is meant by the term ‘Rad resource’? I know what a resource is but what is ‘rad’?
Thanks – David