Communications Practice Section Welcomes Submissions

Communications’ freshly rebooted Practice section is open for business and accepting submissions. Here we describe the kinds of articles we want to publish and offer advice to aspiring authors; our most up-to-date guidance will always be available online.^a (Contact us for further details or to kick around ideas.)

We will consider submissions on any topic of broad interest to the world’s computing practitioners—both the five million working in the U.S. and the millions more in other countries. Practice articles aim to inform and delight a sizable fraction of this audience. Good articles come in many flavors, and we can’t enumerate them all, but we’ll sketch the most promising possibilities.

CACM’s “Pracniques” feature of the 1960s and 1970s as well as Jon Bentley’s “Programming Pearls” column of the 1980s epitomize two excellent patterns: deep dives on specific problems and solutions, often including pithy, fluent code listings^b and lucid expositions of emerging best practices.^c Articles similar in spirit could illuminate today’s computing landscape and elevate today’s coders.

Cautionary tales and corrections also have their place: hard-won lessons forged in adversity,^d postmortems on technologies that disappointed early hopes,^e corrigenda of authorities such as textbooks^f,g and language standards,^h and the debunking of bunco.ⁱ

We are open to other ideas, but a tepid reception likely awaits submissions that stray far from these guidelines. Finally, note that some genres belong in other parts of Communications: Opinion pieces should be submitted to the Opinion section and new ideas not yet in production should go to Research and Advances.

Our main evaluation criteria for submissions will be practicality and rigor. A practical article is actionable for large numbers of readers: It improves their craftsmanship in some tangible way. Rigor begins with clarity and concreteness. Practice articles facilitate appraisal (for example, by providing working code) and prove usefulness with hard evidence (for example, field experience from production environments). Originality matters, but we expect occasionally to publish articles that connect well-known but widely scattered dots or that make arcane techniques accessible to a far wider audience.

Have an idea for a great Practice article? As carpenters say, “Measure twice, cut once.” First, email us. If your topic is unsuitable or already covered by papers in our pipeline, you’ll avoid further fruitless fuss. Otherwise, we’ll brainstorm with you and help you develop an outline. Early on, we’ll want to know the size of your target audience and your plan for ensuring that your article reaches it.

Next, as you write, think for yourself but not by yourself. Enlist help from friends and colleagues to sharpen the presentation; if the article doesn’t excite them, something is wrong with it. You’re allowed up to 6,000 words, but you should strive for brevity to improve clarity. To appeal to the widest possible audience, adopt what Bentley calls a “ladder” style of presentation: Offer readers at every level of expertise, from newbie to veteran, a rung on which to plant a foot and start climbing.

Submit your article following the detailed instructions in the Practice Call for Papers. If it reflects our assistance and advice, its chance of acceptance will be higher. If we accept your submission, you’ll work with professional editors to polish your prose and create an appealing layout. After publication, we hope you’ll help us publicize your article widely to ensure that its intended audience reads it.

This is a lot of work, but it brings big rewards. As ACM’s flagship, Communications offers both prestige and visibility, reaching 100,000 ACM members in print and countless more readers via the open-access Communications website. Our readership is remarkably diverse, spanning academia and industry around the globe. Communications articles are permanently archived in ACM’s Digital Library; the most impactful and timeless become canonical literature.

We devoted our careers to computing because it is both useful and joyful. We look forward to working with Practice authors whose articles expand both the utility and the delights of computing.