editorial guidelines


Below is some advice that we thoroughly recommend that you read before starting to write your feature. By following the guidelines provided, your article will have the best opportunity make an impact across entire readership of Compound Semiconductor.


1. Think about your audience


Your article for our magazine is not just like another academic paper or conference proceeding. Papers have their purpose – to provide detailed information to a small field of researchers, who will read this ac- count of your research because they need to know about this work. A feature in a magazine, even one with the narrow scope of Compound Semiconductor, still has the potential to be read by a far wider audience. Nearly 60,000 people get a copy, and that includes university researchers, engineers in LED, power amplifier and tool making companies, and market researchers. Many of these researchers will only have a very basic grasp of the technology that you describe, so its essential that you provide a motivation for reading the article, explain things clearly, and engage and entertain them. If you don’t, then only a small number of subscribers will read your feature, and you will have lost the opportunity to gain publicity for your activities.


2. Start by creating a framework


If you start writing and hope that the structure of the feature will appear as you go along, then you’ll be in for a tough time. You’ll keep changing the order, be unsure which message you want to get across, and find the whole exercise very frustrating. Instead, begin by setting out the points that you plan to cover. These can simply be a list of 6-8 bullet points, which define what you will cover and the order that you will go about this.


3. Getting off to a good start


The opening paragraphs – and particularly the first few sentences - are crucial. If you grab the reader at this point, then you will be able to carry them through to the end of the feature. But if you lose them, they will stop reading. Often a feature is about a particular piece of technology that can solve a specific problem. One way to write a good introduction for this is to start by saying how this technology is so useful to us, but it has a particular weakness. After setting the scene, you go on to explain that this drawback can addressed with our novel technology, which ….


4. The heart of the feature


Once you’ve set the scene it is time to describe the technology. Don’t just explain what you’ve done, but why it’s been done that way. A collection of results will probably follow, and here the key is to put things in context. Diagrams and graphs can be useful tools for aiding the reader, and if something is complicated, it might be a good idea to put a fuller explanation in the figure caption, because this allows the main text to tell a simple story.


The most respected, authoritative and widely read magazine connecting the Compound Semiconductor Community 4


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17