Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (for any questions related to this, please contact the editors).
  • The submission follows directions about font, styles, and examples. As a reminder, all figures and examples should be "in-line" as part of the PDF document. There is an option for submitting supplemental material if you have a separate document that needs to be uploaded.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
  • The submission document type is a PDF. (If your essay is provisionally accepted, we will be collaboratively editing it in Google docs. If you have never done so, you may want to become familiar with the program.)
  • No identifying information is included in your submission and the instructions in Ensuring an Anonymous Review have been followed.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • To comply with the terms of the publisher's Crossref membership, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) must be included with references when they are available. To check for DOIs, you can use the Free DOI Lookup form on the Crossref website. By checking the box, you assert that you have included DOIs where applicable.
  • All figures, charts, graphs, and images include alt text.

Author Guidelines

General considerations

The style of your submission should be loosely modeled on what Dan Cohen calls the "blessay," or blog-essay. Blessays engage serious ideas and scholarly literature using a clear, readable style. Referring to exemplars on BLDGBLOG and The Atlantic Magazine's website, Cohen observes that the blessay "uses the apparatus of the web more than the apparatus of the journal, e.g., links rather than footnotes. Where helpful, [it] uses supplementary evidence from images, audio, and video—elements that are often missing or flattened in print." Blessays may freely incorporate links to websites, blogs, Wikipedia, newspaper and magazine articles, YouTube, IMSLP, Spotify, Storify, books in the Open Library, or journal databases.

Alternative text, also called "alt text" must be included for all images, charts, graphs, and figures. Alt text should be limited to 150 characters, and can be added to Word documents easily. Alt text should:

  • Be descriptive and concise: Describe the image clearly but keep it brief. A few words to a short sentence for a simple image or illustration is ideal, and one to two sentences is appropriate for more detailed graphs and charts. See examples below.
  • Add context: Include information that conveys the image's purpose and relevance within the article. Avoid simply describing what the image looks like.
  • Avoid redundancy: Do not start with phrases like "image of" or "picture of." Avoid repeating any information that is used in the figure caption or text. Screen readers will announce the figure as an image, then read the alt text, and then read the figure caption, and the user will ideally be able to gather the information of the whole image from all three elements.
  • Include relevant information: If the image contains relevant text, include it in the alt text.

Examples: We have included two generic cases in which an author would need to provide alt-text.

  • Photograph/illustration: Describe what is shown. (Examples: A woman smiling with short brown hair and glasses from the shoulders up. OR A dog sits on the foreground with a sign that reads “No loitering” with a forest in the background.)
  • Graph/diagram: Say what kind of graph or diagram is being shown (if applicable) and describe what is being measured/compared. Reminder, if the details of the graph/diagram are already described in the figure caption, it doesn’t necessarily have to be repeated in the alt-text. (Examples: A bar graph titled “Average cats per city” comparing the number of cats per household on the y-axis and the names of different cities on the x-axis. The cities include Columbus, Phoenix, Toronto, and Sacramento.)

While we take inspiration from and keep many aspects of the blessay format, Engaging Students will use author-date citations (which will allow readers to more easily find material in the event of broken links or website changes). When possible, please link the citation, allowing for an ease of reference with minimal disruption to the text.

Style Guide

The submission template [forthcoming] will provide information on how to format your document and insert examples, references, and bibliography.

Special terms and further reading

In general, replace explanatory footnotes with a linked citation to another source on the web offering further explanation or a helpful image.

Examples:

"Throughout our in-class discussions, the listening strategy that students hone is to first list the times (minutes and seconds within the recording) of all of the cadences in the exposition, and then determine the location of the medial caesura and EEC to parse the formal sections within the exposition."

–Jenine Brown

"Discussing with students the Music Genome Project (Walker 2009) connected with Pandora Radio will introduce them to practical applications of high order aural thinking."

–Kevin R. Burke

Citations

Please use in-text citations (Author-date), with a link to the source. Although page numbers are not normally used in the blessay format, we encourage them when making direct quotations.

Journal articles

If a cited article is published in a print journal, link the relevant text to a citation in a journal database, Ebscohost, ERIC, or the journal’s website. If the article is open access, link directly to the full article.

Examples:

…Slunt and Giancarlo (2004) have shown that JiTT quizzes given before class to have a greater impact on actively engaging students.

–Bryn Hughes

"An effective performance must not only be correct, but also creative, emotional, and communicative (Mitchell 2011)."

–Deborah Rifkin

Michael Callahan (2012) taught a semester of baroque counterpoint as a hands-on keyboard workshop.

 –Anna Gawboy

Citations of books

When possible, link author text or title text to the appropriate citation on the Open Library, https://openlibrary.org. The use of page numbers is not necessary except when using direct quotations.

Examples:

Michael Rogers (2004, 4) observed that, in many core undergraduate theory curricula, "too much emphasis on narrow course content and acquisition of knowledge . . .obscures the more far-reaching goals of theory instruction…."

–Anna Gawboy

The pedagogical techniques offered in Finkel (2000) attempt to democratize responsibility for learning, rather than treat the teacher as all-knowing authority figure.

–Carla Colletti

Citations of musical recordings or playlists

Link text to YouTube recordings as well as playlists on recording databases like Spotify. When possible, link to an official source (such as Spotify, Last.fm, or the artist’s or label’s own website or YouTube channel) to minimize the likelihood that a reader will follow a link and find that the recording has been removed.

Examples:

"Although we could identify the blues scale used in the C major prelude, we would miss the joke of such a phenomenon occurring in a piece supposedly written in the early eighteenth century."

–Enoch S. A. Jacobus

"Here is a new playlist that includes four canonic examples of Jiangnan Sizhu that very closely match the given paradigm…"

–Kevin R. Burke

Citations of scores

Link text directly to the file on IMSLP or other sheet music database.

Example:

"The opening two measures of Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor…."

Software and other products

Link the title to the manufacturer’s website or another resource explaining its use.

Examples:

"I…used the free and open-source digital editing software Audacity to teach independent, active listening habits." –Crystal Peebles

"Brian discussed Audio Hijack Pro, a downloadable app for Mac OS X…that allows you to make audio recordings…" –Stephen Gosden

Links to unpublished materials

During the submission process, supplementary PDFs or materials can be submitted using the submissions portal. Where possible we would like to host files (e.g. if you are the copyright holder).

Examples:

"This information was gleaned through feedback sheets I distribute periodically throughout the semester."

–Trevor de Clercq

"…using clickers in real time is also useful in aural skills classes, such as asking students to indicate their hearing through the Do/Ti test (Daniel Stevens’s creative development of the guide-tone method)."

–Phil Duker

Bibliographical references

Compile all sources in a bibliography at the end of your blessay. Citations should follow conventions of the "Author-Date" system outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style, http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. The title of each reference can be hyperlinked if there is no DOI, but if a DOI exists, please use that link. As a note, there are many books and articles that do not have DOIs, please check this site if you are in doubt.

Book:

Schubert, Peter. 2008. Modal Counterpoint: Renaissance Style. New York: Oxford University Press.

Grant, Roger Mathew. 2014. Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199367283.001.0001

Print article:

Alegant, Brian. 2008. "Listen Up! Thoughts on iPods, Sonata Form, and Analysis Without the Score." Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 22: 149–76.

Website:

Stim, Rich. "Copyright FAQs." Copyright and Fair Use, Stanford University Libraries. Accessed August 2, 2013.

Blog:

Willingham, Daniel. 2018. "Just how polarized are we about reading instruction?" Daniel Willingham: Science and Education Blog, October 29th. Accessed April 7, 2020.

Publication and Review process

Engaging Students uses an anonymous process, where essays are provisionally accepted and then move on to a peer-editing stage. After it is submitted, your essay will go through an anonymous-peer review. If your article is provisionally accepted, it will move to the collaborative editing stage in Google docs (we will ask you to share it with the Engaging Students Google account engagingstudentsmusic@gmail.com, so that we will then be able to assign reviewers to edit your essay).

It is very important that you are electronically available to work on your essay during the editing window (please see volume announcement for details). During this time, please keep an eye on your email as well as the document itself for comments from the reviewers, who will work with you to improve your essay—both to bring it in line with the style of the volume and to assist with clarity and flow for a greater communicative impact. When you receive a comment, please respond to the comment and/or revise the essay in light of your discussion with your reviewer(s). When you are satisfied that the issue raised by the reviewer has been resolved, mark the comment as resolved. (It will disappear, but will still be accessible in the document history if you want to revisit it later.)

While this interactive process takes more time and effort for the authors, we have found the peer-editing stage to be helpful and successful in past volumes. While we envision the submission-to-publishing process will be smooth, the editorial board reserves the right to decline essays at the end of the peer-revision process if they do not reach the desired standard during the course of the peer-editing. Final acceptance/rejection notifications will come via email.

If you have any questions, please contact Carla Colletti or Philip Duker.

Copyright Notice

This Author Agreement for Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy ("Agreement") is entered into by and between The Ohio State University, on behalf of its University Libraries ("Publisher") and the author ("Author").

For good and valuable consideration, Publisher and Author agree as follows:

1.  Author hereby grants to Publisher the right to publish, reproduce, distribute, translate, transmit and display his/her submitted work and an abstract thereof ("Work") in Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy in whole or in part and in all formats and all media. Author also hereby grants to Publisher the right for Publisher to enter into agreements with third parties that grant such third parties any or all of the rights that Author has granted to Publisher herein. The aforementioned rights may include the rights necessary to index and abstract the Work.  The Author agrees that any subsequent publication of the Work will credit Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy as the site of first publication and provide a link to the Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy website. This Agreement is subject to the terms and expectations outlined on the Publisher's website (http://go.osu.edu/publishing-services).

2.  Author represents and war­rants that:  (1) they are the creator and rights holder of the Work; (2) Publisher's exercise of the rights granted to Publisher herein will not infringe or violate any copyright or any other right of a third party; (3) if the Work contains any third party content, they have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner or that use of third party material is allowed because the material is in the public domain or an appropriate fair use analysis has been performed and there is a reasonable belief that use is permitted and (4) the Work contains nothing libelous or otherwise unlawful. Author hereby agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Publisher and its trustees, officers, employees, agents, and subgrantees from all claims related to Publisher's exercise of the rights granted to Publisher herein or related to the subject matter covered in Author's representations and warranties.

Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, to allow for certain types of reuse without permission. By submitting this agreement, the Author agrees to apply a CC BY 4.0 license to the Work upon publication.

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