Welcome to the Special Topics menu
Articles to appear here are written primarily by students who are using the Conceptual Chemistry curriculum. These articles describe and discuss current events, social/political issues, and emerging technologies that are related to chemistry. Students submit their articles (for assignment) to their instructor, who, if registered with ConceptualChemistry.com, is able to submit articles for web publication. Articles may then be approved for web publication provided they adhere to the following guidelines:
1) Each article must begin with a listing of the article's title, the author's name, and status (instructor/student), school affiliation, word count, and date submitted.
2) Each article must not exceed 1500 words, excluding discussion questions which may not exceed 500 words.
3) The quality of the writing must be suitable for mass-media publication. ConceptualChemistry.com reserves the right to edit the articles for both grammar and content. An article that requires a significant amount of editing will likely be rejected.
4) No plagarism. Cite references as needed. Your article will be a summary of YOUR understanding of concepts (and applications of those concepts) that you learned about from referenced resources.
5) Any images posted with the article must be the intellectual property of the author, privately licensed to the author, within the public domain, or made available to the author through a creative commons license (such as Wikimedia Commons). Images already posted on the web with their own url are preferred. This must be the url for the image, not the url for the page in which the image resides! To create your own custom image (or graphic), you can post your image (or graphic) on an external web site and then provide the url of the image with your article. Alternatively, you can provide a web-resolution jpeg of your image not exceeding 300 KB.
6) Instructions for formating your article are given within the "Special Topics Template".
Instructors should consider allowing students to grade each others articles based upon categories such as readability, reader interest, depth of discussion, and accuracy. In the spirit of competition, only the highest scoring articles are submitted for web publication. Detailed suggestions on how to organize such a writing assignment are provided in the instructors-only area of this website.
It is suggested that articles follow the style of the "Contextual Chemistry" essays appearing in Conceptual Chemsitry, 4e. Some sample articles written by John Suchocki are provided here online. We are seeking a diverse set of topics, but overlap of content between different articles is acceptable. ConceptualChemistry.com will place your article in the chapter to which your article is most related. Your article will remain available to the general public until space is needed to make way for new articles.
To all you budding authors, thank you for your writing efforts, which should prove to be a learning experience for all, yourself included.
Good chemistry to you!
