Considered Opinion Content Standards and Guidelines

Content Standards and Guidelines

The Center for Informed Politics is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that works to help people understand contemporary political issues.

Considered Opinion is part of a new curriculum program intended to help high school students learn the critical thinking skills needed to independently analyze complex political and social issue. Considered Opinion is currently made available to high schools and educational institutions and on a limited newsstand basis.

Each edition of Considered Opinion, is about evenly divided between brief news and information regarding recent political events and the in depth exploration of a specific political issue. The issue focus is comprised of a statistical and historical overview of the topic, followed by an array of brief opinion pieces from a wide array of political perspectives. Discussion questions keyed to the text and a variety of other academic exercises are peppered throughout the journal.

These guidelines are intended to help writers interested in submitting work to Considered Opinion. Members of our editorial staff will be more than eager to discuss these guidelines with you or any address any other questions you may have regarding the Center for Informed Politics or Considered Opinion.

Writing Level

Submissions should generally be written in an engaging and accessible style. The journal is primarily a teaching tool for use in high schools, word choice and sentence structure should thus reflect an appropriate reading level. Standard newspaper writing is a good example of an appropriate language level. Simplicity in diction and sentence construction are strongly encouraged. The editorial staff will gladly assist you in crafting your work for an educational audience.

Documentation

As an educational publication, it is imperative that we adhere to the highest standards of factual accuracy and integrity. As it is a primary goal of the Center to help people learn to assess and evaluate political arguments on their factual merits, we request that submissions include appropriate documentation of statistical and factual claims. Simple endnotes referencing the sources of such information should be included with submissions so that the Center may validate and verify the informational content of each article. For the convenience of the authors, any standard bibliographic form will suffice for submissions. The Center's staff will verify and standardize all references as part of the editorial process.

Tables, Charts and Figures

Considered Opinion strives for clarity in the presentation of information and thus encourages the inclusion of appropriate tables, charts and figures. For the convenience of authors, you may simply submit the chart data and a sketch showing how you would like the data presented. The Center will reformat all charts and tables to maintain consistent visual style. Please document the sources for chart and table data.

Educational and Editorial Review

All materials to be included in Considered Opinion are evaluated by a review panel composed of teachers and educational specialists who work to assure the appropriateness of the journal for use in high schools. The Center also reviews each submission for factual accuracy and linguistic clarity. We reserve the right to modify wording which may be unclear, omit undocumented factual claims, or otherwise edit or amend submissions. In all cases, the editorial staff will seek the personal approval of the authors for any changes made to submitted work.

Errors and Omissions

The Center strives for the highest standards in factual integrity and will verify all documented factual claims made by submitting authors. Nonetheless, the Center for Informed Politics and the staff of Considered Opinion assume no liability for errors of inference or omission which may appear in print or electronic versions of Considered Opinion or any other Center publication.

This page was last updated February 10, 1996