Home Ed: Submission Guidelines

The following information regarding Home Education was gathered from Writer's Market (http://www.WritersMarket.com/) and Home Education staff.

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"Home Education Magazine is for families who enjoy living and learning together. If you're not familiar with homeschooling please study our publication before submitting. If you are familiar with homeschooling you might want to study it anyway, as we do take an active political stance for empowering individual families.

We offer selected articles and columns from each issue at our website:www.home-ed-magazine.com/HEM/issue_index.html.

There is also an excellent collection of reading from our magazine, sorted by topic, in the Homeschooling Information Library at our website.

TOPICS

Any topic of interest to homeschooling families will be considered. Please be aware that we have the most widely diverse readership in the homeschooling community, and our content reflects that diversity. We generally prefer completed articles to query letters. We welcome articles from inexperienced writers, especially mothers with homeschooling experience. Regardless of what you were taught in high school English classes, writing is nothing particularly mysterious. It's only another form of communication. If you can clearly explain your ideas to a friend, you can write a good article for our magazine. Please see the article at the end of these guidelines for tips and information on writing for Home Education Magazine.

We offer two free forums for online communication between writers, columnists, and people who are interested in writing for this magazine:
The HEM-Writers List, a free email list which you can join by going to:www.onelist.com/community/HEM-Writers or send a blank email message to [e-mail].

We also feature our HEM Networking & Discussion Boards with topics including Talk with the Editors of HEM and Homeschooling News and Important Information.

INTERVIEWS

We publish interviews whenever possible, not only with notable homeschooling personalities, but with anyone who might be interesting to our readers, such as parenting experts, children's book authors, childhood learning specialists, college admissions officers, and others. We've interviewed dozens of people already, so please check with us before interviewing someone for Home Education Magazine. We appreciate a selection of sharp, clear photos to choose from when running interviews, and sidebars outlining the individual's achievements or contributions to the homeschooling community. Interviews generally run 1,600 to 2,000 words in length.

DEADLINES

Please feel free to submit an article on any topic at any time, and we'll schedule it appropriately. Please note that articles are often selected 4-6 months ahead of an issue.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions via email are the preferred format (see Suggestions below), please send to [e-mail] (when submitting via email please remember to include your postal mailing address). Our computers are Macintoshes, and we have many filters so we can read most submissions, but sometimes files will need to be reformatted and special formatting (bolds, italics, etc.) will be lost. Please refer to "Suggestions for Email Submissions" below.

General article length is 800 to 1,500 words.

Please include a 40-60 word biographical credit (in third person) with your submission. If you prefer, we can run only your name and city/state. We will also accept pen names.

SUGGESTIONS FOR EMAIL SUBMISSIONS
(from our Articles Editor, Kim O'Hara)

1. Start your subject line with "HEM:" or include the word "article" or "submission" in the subject header to help me sort them out from other email.

2. Include the article in the text of your email so I can look it over quickly and send you a response.

3. Also attach the article as an RTF file, which seems to be the most universal format for all different computer systems, and retains bolding and italics.

4. If you have any footnotes, be aware that RTF files don't include those; make sure they are included in the email text.

5. Include your name, regular-mail address (where we can send payment and a copy of the magazine if your article is accepted), and a short 40-60 wordbio (written in third person).

RIGHTS

Home Education Magazine buys First North American Serial Rights (print and electronic) to all articles, columns, artwork and photos. We upload selected articles and columns from each issue to our website www.home-ed-magazine.com/.

Rights purchased include our right to reproduce your work in CD-ROM format as well as in any other formats of Home Education Magazine in which your work appears, or in an anthology or collection of articles, columns, artwork and photos which have appeared in Home Education Magazine.

All rights not stated here, or not directly related to Home Education Magazine, including Second Serial, or reprint rights, remain yours.

PAYMENT

Feature articles -- $25.00 to $50.00 each, depending upon subject, length, and other factors. We occasionally pay more for articles we've requested, or which require special expenses or considerations. We pay for all work upon acceptance,and contributors always receive at least one copy of the issue in which their work appears.

ADDRESSES

Please address all query letters and articles to Helen Hegener, HEM Managing Editor, email [e-mail]. For subscription problems or other questions please email Mark Hegener at [e-mail]. Due to our workload, we prefer email to phone calls whenever possible, but if you need to speak with someone in the HEM office our number is 509-486-1351.

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What I Look For In Articles
by Kim O'Hara, HEM Articles Editor

If your first paragraph is warm and inviting, and your last paragraph leaves me feeling encouraged, and the rest of your article stays on topic and touches your readers' hearts more than just a few times, you've got a good HEM article.

I can't tell any of the above from a query. I'll respond to most queries (unless the topic is obviously not suitable) with: "Sounds interesting! I'd love to see how you handle it!"

Many of our articles will fall in one of the following categories. Which is/are the most natural kind(s) for you to write?

1. Through your article, we get to visit your home (or go with you on an outing) and watch you and your children learn together. These are the ones that catch my eye first, if done well.

2. In your article, you remember how you learned as a child, and what contact with the real world meant to you in your educational journey.

3. You describe some particularly effective method(s) you use for helping your children (and/or other people's children) explore. Avoid simply listing the steps and techniques. Show us how you and your children happened on the technique, too!

4. You share information you've found that would be helpful to other homeschooling families (example: what happens when homeschoolers apply for college admission, how to organize a convention, community learning resources). Sprinkle this kind of article liberally with real life homeschool examples, wherever possible.

5. Musings... you share from your heart how homeschooling has changed your outlook on life, or what adjustments you've had to make to make it work for you, or how you deal with frustrations (within your own family or from outsiders looking on).

6. Research and news reports... articles about the homeschooling movement itself, like the new NHEN organization.

7. Interviews with people whose works have benefited homeschooling in some way.

Keep in mind that most of our readers tend toward unschooling, that is, delight-directed, self-motivated learning (from life itself... and real books, and real experiences). There are many of our readers who are NOT unschoolers, we realize... but they read HEM because they like the unschooling outlook and expect to find it here.

If you homeschool, but are not an unschooler, you probably still "unschool" in some areas. What have your kids learned through their own motivation? Drawing? Music? Socialization? Internet communication? Cooking? Building? Recreational mathematics? Whatever it is, look at it with a sense of awe at the learning process... then write about that.

I love getting articles from people who know how to spell and punctuate, how to capitalize and use paragraphs properly. But if you aren't real sure of yourself in those areas, don't worry about it. Spelling and punctuation errors are really simple for me to correct. I do it in my sleep. (Ha! Not literally, but sometimes it feels like it, at 2am...) What you have to say, and how much of your personality comes through in what you write, is MUCH more important than whether every word is spelled correctly.

Of course, if I can't understand what you're saying, or you abruptly change your tone or perspective or time reference several times in the course of the article, I might give up on it, or, if you've got something that has a lot of potential, hand it back to you for a rewrite."

Helen Hegener, Managing Editor

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This information regarding Home Education was gathered from Writer's Market (http://www.WritersMarket.com/) and Home Education staff.