Assessing Writing accepts electronic submissions only. An e-mail attachment of the article in Word format should be sent to the
Editor at: lizhl@hkucc.hku.hk. It will then be read by the editor and sent out for peer review. Receipt of manuscripts
will be acknowledged. Authors should keep a copy of the paper exactly as it was submitted in order to assist their later revisions to
the manuscript.
Submission of articles An article submitted for review should not exceed 8,500 words (excluding tables),
should not have been published previously (except as an abstract or part of a published lecture or academic thesis) and should not be
under consideration for publication elsewhere. All contributors to the work and the responsible authorities where the work was carried
out, must agree to the submission of the article for review and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form
without the written consent of the Publisher.
Electronic format requirements for submitted articles We accept most wordprocessing
formats, but Word is preferred. Please submit your file in this format and not as a PDF. The text of the article should be in single-column
format with the layout kept as simple as possible. There is no need to format the text as this will be undertaken in processing the article.
For example, please do not justify text. However, do use bold, italics, subscripts, superscripts, etc. For more information on the preferred
way to prepare your text for submission please visit: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/howtosubmitpaper.
Preparation of text Presentation of your manuscript Please write your text in good English (American
or British usage is fine, but not a mixture). Italics should not be used for Latin expressions, for example, in vivo, et al., per se.
Article submissions should not normally exceed 7,500 words excluding tables.
Manuscripts should follow the style of the American
Psychological Association, Fifth Edition (see: http://apastyle.apa.org/). Prepare the manuscript using double spacing and
wide (3 cm) margins. Number all pages consecutively in the upper right-hand corner. Citations may be given of lexical material from languages
other than English; however, citations from languages not employing a Roman alphabet must be given in a Romanized transliteration or
in a transcription which uses standard symbols available in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The SIL Charis font is preferred for
the presentation of IPA symbols (see: http://scripts.sil.org/CharisSILfont).
Review Policy As Assessing Writing has adopted a double blind reviewing policy, please remove all identifying
features from the paper itself by ensuring that no author's name appears in the main text, in-text citations, reference list, or
any running header. Papers that have not had all such features removed will be returned without review to the author for alteration.
Title Page Provide the following data on the title page (in the order given): Title. This should be kept
concise and informative as titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Author names and affiliations. Provide
present affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names of each of the authors. Indicate all affiliations with
a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the author's name and in front of the appropriate address. Also please provide the
full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name and the e-mail address of each author. Corresponding author.
Clearly indicate who is willing to handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication. It is very important that the
telephone number (with country and area code) is provided in addition to the e-mail address and the complete postal address for the corresponding
author. Present/permanent address. If an author has moved since the work in the article was done, or was visiting at
the time, a "Present address" (or "Permanent address") may be indicated as a footnote to that author's name. Abstract.
A concise abstract is required (of between 100-200 words) stating the purpose of the research, the principal results and major
conclusions. An abstract is often read separately from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. Keywords. Immediately
after the abstract, please provide a maximum of 6 keywords, avoiding general or plural terms and multiple concepts (avoid, for
example, "and", "of"). Only abbreviations firmly established in the field may be eligible. These keywords will be used for indexing purposes.
Abbreviations. Define abbreviations that are not standard at their first occurrence in the article. Vitae.
Include a short (maximum 50 words) biography of each author.
Arrangement of the article Please look at
a recent issue of Assessing Writing to identify the usual structure of articles. A free sample copy of the journal is available
at: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/asw.
Specific Remarks Appendices. If there is more
than one appendix, they should be identified as A, B, etc. Acknowledgements. Place acknowledgements, including information
on grants received, before the references, in a separate section, and not as a footnote on the title page. Footnotes. Footnotes
should be used as little as possible. Number them consecutively using superscript Arabic numbers. Tables. All tables must
be submitted separately from the main article. Number tables consecutively in accordance with their appearance in the text. Place
footnotes to tables below the table body and indicate them with superscript lowercase letters. Preparation of supplementary
data. Elsevier accepts electronic supplementary material to support and enhance your research. Supplementary files offer you the
chance to publish supporting applications, movies, animation sequences, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound clips and
more. Supplementary files supplied will be published online alongside the electronic version of your article in Elsevier Web products.
Authors should submit the material in electronic format together with the article and supply a concise and descriptive caption for each
file.
References Citations in the text: Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present
in the reference list. References cited in the abstract must be given in full. Unpublished results and personal communications are not
recommended in the reference list, and should just be mentioned in the text. Citation of a reference as "in press" implies that the item
has been accepted for publication.
Citing and listing of Web references. Please give the full URL at least. Any further
information, if known (for example DOI, author names, dates, reference to a source publication, etc.), should also be included. Web references
can be listed separately (e.g., after the reference list) under a different heading if desired, or can be included in the reference list.
Text: Citations in the text should follow the referencing style used by the American Psychological Association. For more
information on this style, see the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fifth Edition, ISBN 1-55798-790-4, copies
of which may be ordered from: http://www.apa.org/books/4200061.htmlor APA Order Dept., P.O.B. 2710, Hyattsville,
MD 20784, USA or APA, 3 Henrietta Street, London, WC3E 8LU, UK. You can also find details about this referencing style at: http://linguistics.byu.edu/faculty/henrichsenl/apa/apa01.html.
List: References should be arranged alphabetically and then sorted chronologically if necessary. More than one reference
from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the letters "a", "b", "c", etc., placed after the publication year.
Examples: Reference to a journal publication: Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J. A. J., & Lupton R. A. (2000). The art of writing a scientific
article. Journal of Scientific Communications, 163, 51-59.
Reference to a book: Strunk, W., Jr., & White, E. B.
(1979). The elements of style. (3rd ed.). New York: Macmillan.
Reference to a chapter in an edited book: Mettam, G.
R., & Adams, L. B. (1994). How to prepare an electronic version of your article. In B. S. Jones, & R. Z. Smith (Eds.), Introduction
to the electronic age (pp. 281-304). New York: E-Publishing Inc.
The digital object identifier (DOI) may be used to cite and
link to electronic documents. The DOI consists of a unique alpha-numeric character string which is assigned to a document by the publisher
upon the initial electronic publication. The assigned DOI never changes. Therefore, it is an ideal way of citing a document, particularly
'Articles in press' because they have not yet received their full bibliographic information.
The correct format for citing a DOI
is shown as follows (example taken from a document in the journal Physics Letters B): doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2003.10.071
When you use the DOI to create URL hyperlinks to documents on the web, they are guaranteed never to change.
Colour illustrations If you submit colour figures with your
article then Elsevier will ensure, at no charge, that these figures will appear in colour on the Web regardless of whether or
not they are in colour in the printed version. For colour reproduction in print, you will receive information about the costs after Elsevier
has received your accepted article.
Copyright and Author Rights Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked
to sign a "Journal Publishing Agreement'' (for more information on this and copyright see: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright).
If substantial extracts of text, figures or tables from other copyrighted works are included, written permission must be obtained
from the copyright owners and the source(s) credited in the article. For more information and assistance with this process please visit:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissions.
Authors' rights As an author, you retain rights for a large number
of author uses without the need to obtain specific permission from Elsevier. These include the right to make copies of the article for
your own personal use, the right to use the article in a printed compilation of works and the right to extend the article into book-length
form (with acknowledgement of publication in the journal). For full details of all the rights you retain, please visit: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/copyright#whatrights.
Author Benefits Offprints The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of
the article via e-mail or, alternatively, 25 free paper offprints. The PDF file is a watermarked version of the published article and
includes a cover sheet with the journal cover image and information regarding terms and conditions of use. Additional paper offprints
can be ordered by the authors. An order form with prices will be sent to the corresponding author.
Fast Electronic Publication Once the article has been proofed, it will be published immediately on the journal's 'Articles in Press' section online, thus making
it available to subscribers to read and cite. For more information, visit: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10752935.
Discount Authors are entitled to a 30% discount on Elsevier books (excluding major reference works).
Author Enquiries For questions relating to the submission of your article, please visit the journal's homepage at: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/asw.
Also at: http://authors.elsevier.com/TrackPaper.html you can track your accepted article and set up e-mail alerts to inform
you of its progress. Contact details for questions arising after acceptance of an article, especially those relating to proofs, are provided
after registration of an article for publication.