Contribute a Technical Article to Help Your Peers

You can do a valuable service for the electronics test-and-measurement industry by sharing your technical expertise.

Staff -- Test & Measurement World, 7/1/2000

But please keep in mind this important point: The only reason to write an article for Test & Measurement World is to help a reader do his or her job better.

Please don’t submit an article that promotes your company’s product, either directly or indirectly. We’ll reject it. We are looking for contributed articles that tell readers how to do something, not articles that tell them what piece of equipment to use. We won’t accept an articles that shows how the Model XYZ instrument solved a tricky test problem or an article that explains the advantages of some new technology that is available only in the contributor’s product.

If you have an idea for an article that can help our readers do their jobs better, then we would like to hear from you. You can help make sure you are on the right track by asking yourself three questions:

1. Who will read my article?
To make sure you serve the reader, you need a clear picture of him or her. Focus on an individual—for example, an engineer or engineering manager who is

using design-automation tools to build design-for-test structures into a product,

using benchtop instruments to debug a new chip or board,

on the production floor, trying to get a new production test program up and running on a new test system, or

training technicians to quickly find and repair faults in circuit assemblies that have failed production test.

2. What will this article teach the reader that he or she doesn’t already know?
When you have a clear picture of your reader, determine what you want to tell him or her. Concise descriptions of better ways to make measurements as product complexity and speeds increase will suffice. We discourage news of revolutionary technologies and paradigm shifts.

3. Why would the reader want your information?
What will the reader be able to do after reading your article? It’s not enough that your article provide new information—the information must also be appropriate. A Test & Measurement World article must provide information that the reader can use in her or his job. If your article targets a bench engineer designing microwave systems, your article should tell that person how to use a vector network analyzer—not how to build one.

Now, you probably have a few questions about how to write the article:

What do I need to know about grammar?
Here’s the comprehensive list:

Rule 1. Be excruciatingly accurate with your technical information.

Rule 2. Write in the active voice.

That’s it. We don’t care too much about your spelling, whether you know where to put commas, or whether you dangle your modifiers. Make all the usage mistakes you want. We have trained professionals standing by to fix them.

We do, however, need to know exactly who the “actors” are in your story. Do not write “The stimulus is applied to the unit under test; the response is then measured and analyzed.” Instead, write something like this: “Set up a frequency synthesizer to generate a stimulus signal to the device under test. Use a digital oscilloscope to acquire the resulting output signal. Run data-reduction software on a PC linked to the scope via an EIA-232 interface to analyze the results of successive measurements.”

How long should my article be?
We are flexible about length, but generally, shorter is better. Our articles typically run from 900 to 3000 words. Concentrate on what you want to say—not on how many words you have to say it.

Read contributed articles that have appeared in Test & Measurement World. They will give you an idea of how much and what type of information you can convey in Test & Measurement World’s typical article formats. Some of our most successful articles are brief, tightly focused presentations of a test technique. For example, in “Test EMI Emissions on Telecom Ports,” the author uses 985 words combined with three figures and a table—all of which fit into two magazine pages—to describe how to adapt a test setup to make measurements complying with a revised electromagnetic-interference spec.

We do publish longer contributed feature articles as well. For example, in “ATE Choice Demands Careful Consideration,” the authors use 2200 words and three figures to recount their months-long effort evaluating multimillion-dollar ATE systems, providing technical and business information that readers can use in reaching their own capital-equipment purchase decisions.

How can I increase my chances of publication?
1. Read Test & Measurement World. That’s the best way to help ensure that your article meets our needs. When you have an idea, browse the tables of contents of back issues, or browse the article list on the Web, and read articles that appear similar in scope to what you propose to cover.

2. Call us (617-558-4671). We can try to keep you from going down dead ends. We will let you know, for example, if we already have in the queue an article very similar to what you are proposing.

3. Before you do any writing, prepare a proposal, in either abstract or outline format. Your proposal should answer the three questions presented above: Who will read this article, what will the article teach the reader, and why would the reader want the information (what will he or she be able to do with it)?Your proposal should suggest some illustrations—figures, charts, photos, schematic diagrams—you plan to use and indicate what they will show.

Page 190 contains a sample outline for an article we published (“PCs Let You Gamble on Component Tolerances,”). Try to formulate your objectives clearly in a similar format.

4. Send the outline to us at tmw@cahners.com. Make sure to include your contact information: your name, title, company, address, phone number, fax number, and e-mail address.

We’ll review your proposal in about 14 to 21 days and contact you with our comments. If we believe your proposal shows promise, we will encourage you to complete the article and will provide more guidelines on how to proceed.

After I submit my completed manuscript, will you change my deathless prose?
In general, we edit articles heavily. We need to put them in a format appropriate for magazines—this differs from the style used in test reports and conference proceedings. Also, we may cut sections that don’t directly pertain to your focus. And we may ask for additional information on something that seems second-nature to you but with which our readers may not be familiar. We may reorganize your article to provide a more logical flow. Typically, our editors can cut an article’s word count by 25% without deleting any of the technical information.

There are more details—ranging from copyright issues to your sign-off on page proofs—that we can explain to you once you’ve submitted a proposal that we find promising. For now, get to work on that proposal. T&MW