Writer’s Guidelines

Want to write for us? Here’s how.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Note: We currently only accept Navarians to write for the Navara publication.

First of all, awesome! We’re very happy to welcome you as a writer, no matter your experience in writing or publishing. We’re looking forward to helping you get started, keep going, and put yourself out there as an expert in the field you’re passionate about.

Let’s get started!

Applying as a writer

To apply as a writer, you’ll need your Medium username. You can find your Medium username by clicking on your profile picture, here:

Where to find your Medium username.

Then, you have 2 options:

1. Leave your Medium username in a comment on this article.
2. Leave us a message (including your username) on our Slack channel: #community-writing-technical-blogs.

One of our editors will then add you as a writer, and contact you about submitting your first article.

Communication

All communication concerning writing for the publication takes place in our private Slack channel. You can find us at #community-writing-technical-blogs.

Submitting your article

After you have made sure your article adheres to our guidelines below, you can submit your article. Here’s how that works.

Topics

We don’t limit the topics you can write about, as long as they are (remotely) tech-related. That said, here’s a few ideas:

• Tutorial-style articles on topics you have encountered in your daily work or life.
• Deep dives into specific technology or practices.
• Experiences you’ve had, and the learnings you gained from them.

Opinion pieces are very welcome, but note that we will look at those through the lens of Navara’s own opinions, and how they may affect our brand. We welcome discussion, but we’re careful about how to have those discussions in public.

Guidelines

We try to maintain a high standard for any articles submitted to our publication. As such, we have a set of guidelines we request all writers to adhere to.

Basics

• Articles should be written in English. However, we are more than willing to help you translate an article written in Dutch. Just let us know.
• Please make sure your Medium account is complete, i.e. it should have your name, a short bio, and a profile picture. Articles will be published under your name, so this is beneficial to you, as well.
• Make sure you are using all 5 topic slots you have available (either through the Change topics menu or on the submission page). This makes your article easier to find. If you have a slot left, just add Navara as a topic.

Submitting to the NAVARA publication.

Headlines and Headings

• Your article should have a title and a subtitle. Also, please make sure the values in the Change display title / subtitle menu are the same.

• While not an end-all, be-all solution, using a Headline Analyzer can help you craft a better headline. One tip; when in doubt, ignore the advice, and go with what you think is best. It’s your article, after all.
• We follow AP style for title capitalization. This means all major words are capitalized, while minor words are lowercase. Title Case Converter is a helpful tool, if you’re not sure.
• In your subtitle, use sentence-case; this means capitalizing it like you would any other sentence.

Images and Code Blocks

• Your article should have a cover image (also known as a Feature Image) that you have the rights to use. Either your own, or an image licensed under Creative Commons. We recommend sites like Unsplash for finding images to use. You are required to credit any image used properly. See the top of this post for an example.
  Note that sometimes, an image will look great above an article, but will look, let’s say, less great in the story preview (which shows a square version of your image). Fortunately, you can do a lot to improve this. Reading this article, for example.
• Images should have an alt text, and a caption. You can access the alt text by clicking on your image:

• If you use code snippets, use either Medium code blocks or GitHub Gists. For multiple code snippets, we suggest multi-file Gists, as illustrated in the article.

Spelling and Formatting

Please (pretty please?), use a tool like Grammarly to look for spelling errors, grammatical inconsistencies, and whatever else Grammarly helps you find (it’s a lot!). This saves our editors a lot of time and allows us to focus on the content of your article instead of fixing spelling errors.

• The Grammarly extension for Google Chrome works inside the Medium editor, which is really nice.
• Whitespace is your friend. Use short paragraphs rather than long, and break them up using whitespace. The Medium editor mostly takes care of this for you.
• While common in scientific writing, please do not use footnotes for links. Include them in the text. Scrolling back and forth to reach a link disrupts the reading experience, and will cause people to stop reading.
• It is very helpful to your reader to include a Resources section at the end of your article, containing useful links mentioned in your article. For example, links to GitHub repos, Gists, JSFiddles, etc.

Voice

• Remember that you are engaging with your reader when you write. Treat your writing as a dialogue, not as an information dump. It’s nice to thank the reader for spending part of their day with you. Obviously, this is not mandatory, if it’s not your style.

Plagiarism

• Any quotes or otherwise quoted content must be properly credited. We take plagiarism very seriously. Any repeated attempt at trying to pass another’s work off as your own will result in you being removed from the publication.

About AI-Generated Content

AI is a tool just like any other. Forbidding you to use AI would be like forbidding you to use Google. However, you are still the author of your article, and we expect you to have written it.

That’s it. We will be updating this article if and when the need arises, based on your feedback. So let us know if there’s anything we’re missing, or if you have any other questions and/or comments.

We hope to see your articles in our publication soon!