Every community has standards and expectations surrounding how members of that community communicate with one another
You already understand how to change how you communicate based upon your audience; for instance, the words/style you use to write an email to your professor are different than when you send a text message to a friend. If we consider a journal a "community", then the journal's formatting guidelines indicate what these standards and expectations are. These can include:
- whether active or passive voice is preferred
- the scope of the journal (i.e. what topics does the journal publish about)
- what style guidelines does the journal use (punctuation, citation, etc.)
- which peer review process do they use
- copyright information - who will own the published work?
You will find this information on the journal's about or information for authors pages. You will also get better at formatting the way a particular journal prefers by reading lots of articles published by that journal. At Cougar JUGR, we follow the Nature formatting guide.
