We love you, you’re perfect, now edit

So your article’s been accepted for publication in a technical magazine—now what? The congratulations are over, the thank-you cards have been sent, and you’re alone in the new house with your new spouse, the editor. How does the road to bliss begin? Here are some practical tips to a happy editorial marriage.

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• Read the magazine’s official author guidelines. It might seem obvious, but many people are surprised that the tone for journals differs from that of magazines when it comes to writing style. Save yourself a lot of headaches and hair follicles by reading the ‘prenup’ so that you’re prepared for the first editing round.
• Meet your deadlines. If you’re out of town or won’t be available, tell your editor. Many editorial types work on multiple publications, and it’s critical that they schedule their time. If the deadline is unreasonable, let them know. They’re willing to work with you, but they don’t know what you don’t tell them.
• Use ‘Track Changes’ in Word documents. It’s much harder to collaborate on an article when nobody can tell how it’s evolved. Editors know when you’re trying to slip them a mickey. If you don’t like how ‘Track Changes’ looks, don’t turn it off—hide it. Turning it off just gives the editor the extra work of using ‘Compare Documents.’ And nobody likes that particular ‘feature.’
• Watch your tone in email. Your editor isn’t out to get you—his or her goal is to work closely with you to produce a technically accurate, timely, useful, and readable article. Insulting your editor, threatening his or her job, or intimating that a future lawsuit could be in order won’t endear you to the editorial staff, and word travels fast around the office. Let’s put it this way—the wise diner doesn’t berate a waiter before that person brings out the soup.
• Realize that all magazines edit their content. Nobody—but nobody—gets his or her text printed on glossy paper without someone changing it somehow. Use of contractions won’t kill you or your career. Just because The New York Times doesn’t do it, does that mean you can’t? No! If you threaten to take your 2000-word opinion piece over to The Atlantic because its editors won’t dare insert headers in your wall of text, you’re so very, very wrong.
• Give us high-resolution images. The JPEGs and GIFs that are great for the Web, don’t always work for print. Low-resolution images print fuzzy and are unreadable; no one wants that.
• Give us a recent, decent picture of yourself. No one looks like they did in their college yearbook picture 20 years later. You look great just the way you are—nobody needs or wants to see a picture of you dancing in a chef’s hat, swimming in a pool shirtless, or sitting there drunk in your $40-a-night hotel room ordering room service in a dirty Hawaiian shirt. One author noted that he didn’t know how to get a recent picture. His 10-year-old son, however, did. Kids can be useful sometimes.

Forsaking all others . . .

• Don’t format your original document. Once the article goes into layout, the styles you’ve labored over—margins, type size, colors—are thrown out in favor of the magazine’s templates. Save yourself time and use the default styles or, better yet, the one the editors provide.
• Don’t assume you know the magazine’s audience and overall style better than someone who’s paid to work on it. Listen to your editors. If they tell you that you need to spell out an acronym, you absolutely should—not everyone in the magazine’s readership is intimately familiar with the jargon in your particular part of the field, and even the ones who are might welcome the chance to pass your article on to someone who isn’t.
• Don’t shy away from active voice. You want readers to understand what you tell them, so be clear and concise. If not, rest assured they’ve already flipped the page over to another article that is. It can be confusing to parse a dense, intricate sentence full of unfamiliar technology or sciences. Passive voice works in a Jane Austen novel; in scientific prose, active voice engages the reader more directly.
• Don’t embed images in Word documents. Turn in your images separately, and the magazine’s production staff will do the rest.
• Don’t dictate template style. They’re called templates for a reason—the editorial staff uses them to maintain the integrity of the design. Your editor won’t tell you how to run your experiment, you don’t tell him or her what color the headings should be. And no, the production staff won’t make your name larger because you’re awesome.

Remember, at the end of day, the editor is your partner. Yes, that first edit stings a bit when you open up the file, but take a deep breath and think of the bigger picture. No one wants to sleep on the couch, and no one wants to go to bed angry. Remember, too, that Einstein’s and Shakespeare’s works were edited. Keep an open mind and remember how nice your article will look in the end.

Kathy Clark-Fisher, Jenny Stout, and Monette Velasco work at the IEEE Computer Society’s publishing center in Los Alamitos, California.