Tips for contributors

We welcome your contributions to IEEE Region 8 News. Use the information on this page to help you prepare and submit articles for inclusion in the newsletter.

Section / Chapter / Branch / Affinity Group activity reports

These reports are the lifeblood of IEEE Region 8 News, keeping members all over the Region up to date with what you’re up to. However, to make sure we can fit all the reports into each issue, it helps if they are brief and to the point.

Typical articles in this category include: news items, conference announcements and reports, awards recognitions, and summaries of events and activities. Photos are highly encouraged.

Word count:

• Announcements referring to future events should be brief, no more than 200 words.
• Reports on past events should be between 200 and 400 words. That’s not very long – in many cases that’s only a few sentences!

Here are some tips on how to keep your reports concise:

• Always begin the article with your biggest news
• Write like a news reporter: who / what / where / when / why / how
• Concentrate on your most successful recent events only
• For an event, include dates, location and number of attendees
• State the name of your Section / Chapter / Branch
• State the name(s) of the author(s), state their volunteering title or role in the activity/event
• Don’t waste words on off-topic detail (such as the gala dinner menu)
• Avoid long lists of ‘thank you’s
• Include links (URLs) to additional information, as needed.

In other words, just try to stick to key facts, and avoid exposition. Also be wary of redundant sentences such as “The workshop was well received” (if the lecture had been badly received, you wouldn’t be writing about it) or “The attendees thanked Professor X” (readers will already take this for granted). Remember, you only have a limited word count, so make the most of it.

Opinion articles and more

We welcome articles on just about any subject you think might be of interest to IEEE members, including opinion pieces, topical discussions, and book reviews. You might even like to challenge readers with a quiz. Feel free to discuss your idea with the editors before you start writing.

Remember that IEEE Region 8 News has limited space, so don’t try to write more than 600 words for a special article like this. In a newsletter, you can dispense with essay style – no need for introductions and conclusions. Instead, get right to the point and say what you want to say.

Photos and captions

We welcome your photos and will make room for them in the newsletter wherever we can.

• Photos taken with smartphones are great. Get in close to your subject matter and the results will be perfect.
• Don’t try to downsample, enhance or correct your images: a clean original always produces the best results!
• Please don’t superimpose logos and timestamps: we may not be able to use such photos.
• Write a caption for each image so that we know who or what they show.
• Remember to state the photographers’ names for acknowledgement purposes.

The submitted photos, images, or graphics may be edited or resized for placement.

File formats and submission

By using your GoogleApps@IEEE account (available to members at no additional cost), you may submit your article through the IEEE R8 Publications & Communications (PnC) Contribution Submission Form. Please mark “Region 8 News” when asked about “Targeted domain for Content/Information publishing”.

Alternatively, send your articles directly to R8 News Editors at [email protected]. You can attach documents in any text format (docx, rtf, txt) or just paste your text into the email message body. Photos and images should be sent as attachments. If you are concerned about attaching lots of high-resolution pictures, share them with us via a Google Drive folder, Dropbox, or alike, or, use a free file transfer service such as WeTransfer.

Please do not embed your photos into PDF files, though – this nearly always has the effect of converting, downsampling and blurring them. Photos embedded into Word docx files is usually fine.

Copy deadlines

The best way of ensuring your reports and articles are timely is to plan ahead according to our copy deadlines. Region 8 News is a quarterly publication, so missing an issue deadline will set you back three months! Also note that our print ‘lead’ times are such that we need to receive your articles TWO MONTHS before the cover date, due to printing and distribution to all members around Region 8!

Authorization

By submitting a contribution/article to the IEEE Region 8 Newsletter, you are agreeing that the content submitted will be publicly available, and you are authorizing the IEEE Region 8 to edit and publish the submitted content while crediting all the authors of the text and images.

Please note that the Editorial team may not be able to publish all submitted content or may publish it in a future newsletter issue, instead of the current one.

GDPR

By submitting a contribution/article to the IEEE Region 8 Newsletter, you are agreeing with IEEE GDPR policy and giving permission to IEEE to publish the names of all the authors of text and images.