Thank you for your willingness to write a book review for the LINGUIST List.

LINGUIST List only accepts reviews that have been solicited through the reviews system. Unsolicited reviews will not be accepted.

Because of changes that the LINGUIST List programmers have made to the interface we use to submit reviews, we are able to simplify our instructions considerably. The most important change is that we now can accept reviews submitted as attachments to email messages to reviewslinguistlist.org, provided that they are in plain text (.txt) or rich text (.rtf) format. You can also submit your review in the body of your email message, as we previously required.

General Instructions

Your review should consist of the following parts in the order indicated. (Do not include the numbers, however.)

1. A short bibliographical description of the book. If you can, cut and paste the bibliographic description of the book in the original announcement as in the following examples (which are taken from http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1683.html), omitting the ISBN and ANNOUNCED IN lines. Otherwise, provide the same information in the order indicated. (If the book does not have a subtitle or is not part of a series, those lines should be omitted.) Do not include any other information, such as place where published, number of pages, price, ISBN or link to its announcement on LINGUIST.

2. Your by-line, consisting of your name and affiliation, as in the following examples.

3. A description or summary of the book's purpose and contents. For example, if it is a textbook, indicate what audience it is intended for, and briefly what it covers. If it is a monograph, summarize its main points without going into technical detail. If it is an edited collection of papers by different authors, state what each paper is about, and how they go together.

4. A critical evaluation. Insofar as you can, point out some of the merits and defects of the book, identify problems, ask questions, and present positive or negative implications of the analyses contained in it. Bear in mind that LINGUIST reviews are often the first evaluations of a book available to the linguistic community; and unlike paper journals, LINGUIST not only encourages authors and readers to reply, but also offers them the immediate opportunity to do so. In keeping with standard LINGUIST policy, we ask that reviewers keep the tone of reviews scholarly, and avoid directly attacking persons and institutions. This does not mean that the reviewer should avoid controversy or criticism, only that the tone of that criticism should be maintained at a scholarly level. Reviews that do not meet LINGUIST standards for scholarly discourse will be returned to the author for revision.

5. A complete list of references of all the works that you cite in the body of the review. In the places in the text where you cite references, give the authors' names and dates of publication, and page numbers if relevant, as in the following examples.

Put the complete references of citations (using any commonly used reference style) in the list of references, as in the following examples.

6. A biographical sketch. Write a short paragraph about yourself, describing your research interests, career goals, etc. Take a look at recently posted reviews for examples.

Some Practical Considerations.

A. Your review can be of any reasonable length, but the 1500 to 2500 word range is optimal.

B. The review must be written in English. It can be read in any of the languages for which LINGUIST provides automatic translation.

C. Avoid using acronyms, even those you think every linguist knows, but if you do use them, write them out in full at first mention, and put the acronym in parentheses, as in the following example.

D. Please submit your review within six weeks of receiving your copy of the book. Send the review by email to reviewslinguistlist.org. Do not return it to Randy's or Chas' linguistlist email address. If you are not able to complete the review in a reasonable amount of time, we will ask that you return the book to us by regular mail so we can send it to another reviewer.

E. If you send your review in the body of your email message, make sure that sections, paragraphs and examples are separated by two hard returns. Any line length is acceptable, since we will remove any carriage returns or line feeds within a paragraph. However, we urge you not to copy and paste text that you have prepared using a word processor into your email, since strange things happen to certain characters, especially "smart quotes", when you do so. If you prepare your review using word processing software, save it as a plain text or rich text format file first, check it over to make sure it still looks ok, and then send it as an attachment. If your email system does not allow for attachments, first save the review as plain text, next close it and reopen it as a text file, and finally copy and paste it into your email message. If you have any problems, drop a note to reviewslinguistlist.org explaining your situation.

F. Do not use any special formatting, such as italics, boldface, underlining, superscripts, or subscripts. Do not include tables or charts. Make the best use of the resources at hand, such as single and double quotation marks and capitalization. Also please do not use the Tab character. Use spaces for aligning elements in interlinear glosses.

G. If you need to use IPA characters in your review, make sure to use a Unicode font when submitting your file as an attachment.

H. Keep an electronic copy of the version of the review that you send us, both because your review may not reach us the first time you send it, become garbled in transmission, or because we may require revisions. You may also wish to compare your original version to the one we email back to you.

I. You have the right to republish your review elsewhere. We ask only that you include the complete URL for your review as it appears in LINGUIST, as in

This review appeared originally in the LINGUIST List at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-839.html.

J. Once your review is posted, you are welcome to keep the book.

If you have any other questions or comments, please contact our Book Review editor, Randy Eggertr <randylinguistlist.org>

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