writers’ guidelines

Are you a fish expert? Have you ever dreamed of writing for TFH? Submit an article or article idea today! Please follow these guidelines in preparing your submissions.

Article Format

Manuscripts should be submitted as email attachments to editor@tfh.com.

Text should be left justified only.

The presentation of your material should be professional, indicating you understand the nature of publishable text. We often receive articles that are formatted to look nice on the screen. For the magazine, however, such formatting is applied during article design, and all of it must be stripped from the text before we can send it to the Art Department. Therefore, we want plain text without formatting.

Test text paragraph

Do not insert photos into the text. Photos must be submitted separately.

Use no formatting other than italicization of scientific names. That is, do not use bold, underline, font changes, font size changes, font colors, all caps, centering, styles, page numbers, headers, margin adjustments, tabs, line spacings, paragraph indents, columns, or any other formatting.

Turn off widow/orphan control, margin changes, formatting, styling, bookmarks, and anything else that inserts codes into the text. These can create mayhem when the text is sent to Design.

Do make sure, however, to italicize scientific names; it is a real pain to have to insert italics throughout an article. The genus name is italicized and has an initial capital; the species name is italicized and all lowercase. Example: Leporinus fasciatus.

Other taxa are initial capitalized but not italicized: Cichlidae, Mollusca, etc.

Common names of fishes are capitalized only if they contain proper nouns—albino tiger barb, Odessa barb, convict cichlid, Australian rainbow.

Be very sparing with tonal emphasis. Do not use bold or ALL CAPS to indicate emphasis. Use only italics, and only rarely.

Quotation marks are for quotes. They are rarely justified in other uses. If you are not quoting someone else's words, it is very unlikely you need to use the marks.

Article Content

We are looking for good writing about interesting topics. It is important to be clear, precise, succinct, and organized. We do not pay by the word, so trim your prose to be as tight as possible.

Be accurate. Research your topic fully. Do not repeat hearsay or opinions; report facts. When drawing conclusions from personal experiences, be careful not to over generalize.

Proofread your material! Check your spelling and punctuation. Watch out for homonyms. Use serial commas. Pay attention to restrictive versus nonrestrictive subordinate clauses. Keep track of agreement and sequence of tenses.

CHECK SCIENTIFIC NAMES! We often get manuscripts with misspelled scientific names or incorrect scientific names. Do your homework and get it right. A good resource for scientific names is www.fishbase.org.

Send submissions to:

Tropical Fish Hobbyist Magazine
One T.F.H. Plaza
Third & Union Avenues
Neptune City, NJ 07753
Attn: Nicholas Violand
E-mail: nvioland@tfh.com

 

Thank you - we look forward to seeing your work!