Write for VisionWizard
Share your wisdom, thoughts, and knowledge to inspire
Table of contents
- Why become a contributor?
- Submission rules
- Guidelines
- How can you contribute?
Why become a contributor?
We are a group of passionate young engineers/researchers trying to group, read and source the most authentic and quality content in AI on medium.
VisionWizard Inc. operates an independent Medium publication. We are looking for writers to propose up-to-date content focused on computer vision, deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science and technology in general.
If you love to write about these topics, read on!
Why choose VisionWizard instead of other major publications out there.
Came into existence in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, we are relatively new to Medium. Though we have started recently, our drive to put quality content out is none less than some of the biggest publications out there.
We are a group of engineers/researchers/problem-solvers like you, trying to learn new things and apply them to projects/ideas for fun.
We genuinely believe in creating sensible structured content in the field of AI which has been missing due to a plethora of low quality and repetitive articles on medium published generated every day for follower gains.
We are one of the few publications focusing on an in-depth explanation of high-quality research ideas. There is a huge gap between the research community and the developer/engineer community. We are just hitting the tip of the iceberg and authors like you will help us to narrow these gaps.
You will get an opportunity to grow as a writer and create a following with your articles. For the new authors, we will provide all the help needed to make the onboarding process smooth.
Publishing in VisionWizard enables you to reach a broader audience of like-minded people and earn money through the Medium Partner Program. You also remain the only owner of your work, in accordance with the Medium Terms of Service that you agree to when establishing a Medium account.
Earn money through the Medium Partner Program. Writers can choose to meter stories that are on VisionWizard and earn money through the Medium Partner Program based on engagement from Medium members. “Metering” refers to making a story eligible to earn money behind Medium’s metered paywall.
Writers keep 100% of the earnings they earn through their Medium account as part of the Medium Partner Program. However, the Medium Partner Program is not administered by VisionWizard and we do not pay contributors directly for articles they voluntarily contribute.
You will remain the only owner of your work and will be able to edit or delete it at any moment, even after we have published it. The feedback our editors and community providers will appear at the relevant places in your article. You will be able to dismiss or respond to them.
Submission rules
Before submitting your article, there are a few important things you need to know. Make sure you go through each point well, and understand them, as by submitting an article to VW, you are agreeing to comply with all of them.
- Medium’s Rules and Terms of Service apply to VisionWizard(VW) as it is a Medium publication. Make sure you read it before submitting your article.
- We have adopted Medium’s Content Guidelines and Medium’s Curation Guidelines for every article that is published VisionWizard. This means that if your post isn’t of a high enough quality to be curated or doesn’t follow the guidelines, we won’t publish it on VisionWizard.
- As explained in Medium’s Terms of Service, you own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium and therefore VisionWizard. You’re also responsible for the content you post. This means you assume all risks related to it, including someone else’s reliance on its accuracy, or claims relating to intellectual property or other legal rights.[1]
- You can edit and remove your article from our publication at any time.
- The editors at VisionWizard might directly edit your write-up to correct basic grammar and update minimal formatting. If required, we might remove gifs, images, videos, embeddings, etc. where the source isn’t clearly specified. Copyright violation is a serious issue and could happen to you. It is your responsibility to ensure you own or have a legal right to use, all content, images, and videos you include in your articles.
- We can remove any articles you post on VisionWizard for any reason if we fill necessary. If we do so, your content will not be lost but still hosted on Medium.com and archived and you will be notified in advance.
- We don’t tolerate any kind of discrimination based on religion, faith or colour in our articles. Please avoid dual context wordings that can lead to in that direction.
- The last one is important. If our editorial team finds one or more violations of our rules, we reserve the right to remove all of your articles from our publication and report them to Medium.
Guidelines
Here are a few points that you can into account while writing an article for our publication.
Your thoughts and ideas are important to us!
If you are not a professional writer, you might want to consider the following points for your article. We want to publish high quality, authentic, professional articles that people want to read.
**Please be cautious that if you don’t follow our submission guidelines, your article won’t be accepted.**
1. Write something out of ordinary. Something that you are proud of.
Am I writing something that people want or are it just me?
Repetitive and boring ideas are everywhere. The world needs something fresh. Don’t be a 10000th author writing about convolution.
If you are pursuing an idea that is already explained by many people than you might want to reconsider before writing. Note that your take on it might be different, but is your take different enough to publish now?
If your idea or take on existing ideas has a radical approach, people will read it. They will want more. Engage more. That’s just how content traction works. The tendency of readers craves for content that is unnatural and divergent to their thinking.
There has to be good balance between author’s view of what to write and reader’s view of what to read otherwise you will be shooting in the dark
2. What is your idea and how to go about it?
Tell us/reader that what you will be talking about in a two-three line introduction. This is a major selling point. Your article can make or break here.
- What is your original idea?
- Why should anyone care?
- How are you going to prove your point?
- Do you have enough quality evidence to support?
Without a definite structure and cohesion of ideas, you may lose the interest of the reader. You need a clear intro followed by all details required to explain your article in the most succinct manner. More the authentic sources the merrier.
Use all the data, images, videos, charts, gifs, you want to get your message across. Always remember, eyes perceive information much faster.
Hit a strong conclusion. This is where you leave the reader with an impression and they may end up following you. You need to get all of this right for your words to make a mark.
Remember though, VisionWizard is not your personal blog, keep it engaging and to the point! If you can prove your point in 2 mins, they keep it that way. You will save everyone’s time.
3. Do authenticity measurement of what you write
This is very important to us. It is very similar to the quality assurance of software development but for your write-up. We want to make sure that the content we put across our channel is quality and worth their time.
Reading and sourcing information from reliable sources is lacking in today’s media. Hence, it is very important that we instil factualness in our stories.
Here are some places where you can get the possible information
- Peer-reviewed Research Papers
- Reputed journals and conferences.
- Leading authors
- Books
Avoid citing information from unverifiable sources like public forums, open discussions, twitter, Wikipedia, etc. We want to stick to facts and evidence-based novel ideas; not opinions. Do a fact check and present your not self-evident ideas based on it.
4. How engaging and appropriate are your title and subtitle?
If you scroll up this page you will see what a title and subtitle look like. Your post also needs to have a short title and a longer subtitle that tell potential readers why they should read your post. Overall, your header is useful for making your aims clear to readers.[1]
Also, when your subtitle is directly under the headline and it’s formatted as H2 it will show up in some post previews which helps with the click-through rate.[1]
5. What value proposition do you deliver to your readers?
Make sure your post achieves its purpose.
First, if your goal is to explain several concepts, ensure that these concepts are bared to their essentials, narrated in an orderly sequence, and illustrated with simple and accurate analogies.[1]
Second, use concrete language and visual imagery. As Steven Pinker puts it in his book The Sense of Style: “We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions.” and he continues “Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images”.[1]
Third, work to improve your writing skills. You could start by replacing linking and light verbs such as ‘to be, is, going, become, bring, make, take, have’, by more precise action verbs. For example, you could say ‘agile’ instead of ‘going fast’. There is plenty of great advice on the internet. It helps in creating a subconscious engagement with your readers.
Finally, check for spelling, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes. If you can’t do it yourself, use Grammarly and then ask a friend to help you. As we are such a small team, we can’t correct every submission.[1]
6. Use code if possible
Using clean and readable code snippets brings a lot of credibility to your article when it comes to explaining technical concepts.
For eg: If you are explaining convolution operation on images, its implementation as a modular functionality in python can bridge an important gap from idea to execution.
Please don’t screenshot your code but use one of these two other solutions[1]:
- Medium’s native code blocks & inline code
- Use GitHub gists
If you paste a code within your article, be sure to explain it so all your readers can follow what you are doing.
7. Avoid Communal Slang
The use of slang degrades the readability of the article. Try to stick to the point and make sure you write sharp and with proper grammar. Use common words understood by most people to share your message across.
8. Cite References
Please cite each and every reference wherever necessary. These create a proper link of information and are therefore cohesive.
For your references, please respect this format:
[X] N. Name, Title (Year), Source
9. Tags are mighty important. Have you used them to their power?
The more specific and relevant your tags, the easier it is for readers to find your article and for medium and us to classify and recommend your post to the relevant audience. Depending on the tags you choose, your post will be featured on our features pages like deep research, quick reads, general topics, etc. [1]
We may change one or two tags before publication. We would do this only to keep our different sections relevant to our readers. For instance, we would want to avoid tagging a post on linear regression as “Artificial Intelligence” to more a specific tag of “Machine Learning”.
10. Use Visual forms to express.
From newspapers, websites, ads, menus, etc. everywhere you will see visual forms like images, videos, gifs, etc. to send a message with minimal text.
It sticks to the reader’s mind and creates an impact. When you use it to its full potential, it will create a lot of engagement.
This is what you can do to add an appealing featured image to your post:
- Take one yourself. Your phone is almost certainly good enough to capture a cool image of your surroundings. You might even already have an image on your phone that would make a great addition to your article.[1]
- Use Quantitative graphs. Everybody loves fancy charts. If your post involves data analysis, spend some time making at least one graph truly unique.
- Use Unsplash. Most of the content on Unsplash is released under Creative Commons CC0, which means their photos are safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist — even for commercial purposes.[1]
- Spend a few bucks. Stock photos look amazing at a very minimal cost. You can try sites like Photodune, Shuttershock, Istockphotos, Depositphotos, and more.
11. Have you gone through medium’s guidelines?
We have adopted Medium’s curation guidelines for every article we publish. If your post doesn’t adhere to high enough quality to be curated or doesn’t follow the curation guidelines, we won’t publish it on VisionWizard.
Don’t have stress a lot, these are norms followed across the world for the better conveyance of ideas. Once you respect it, you will communicate better. A skill much valued.
Medium Curation Guidelines Link
12. Did you get any feedback before submitting your post?
Always make sure to review your write-up from others. It may be your friend, aunt, teacher, etc. having some background of what you have written.
Having worked so hard on that article, you wouldn’t want to let a silly mistake push readers away. [1]
If you don’t know who to ask, you can share it on this Discord server. Please note that this is a community-driven, maintained and moderated project. [1]
13. Is your Medium profile real?
Please include your real name, a photo, and a bio.
We refrain from publishing posts from anonymous people. If you want us and your readers to trust you, you have to reveal who you are. Violation of it and we will prohibit any further submissions.
14. Are you getting better?
Take a minute to reflect on the work you have been doing so far, and the current article you wish to publish. What value are you bringing, and to whom? In which ways are this article better or worse than the ones you previously published?[1]
As an author, you should aim to improve after every article. If you feel that your efforts and words should be accounted for, you need to accumulate learning and improve.
May your writing loss gradients towards global minimum.
Please fill the following writer onboarding form here [Link] to get started.
Once we send an approval from our side, you can send us a sample article on any topic of AI as per following instructions.
Please make sure to follow the instructions listed below:
- Email us the article via medium draft link. Don’t share google doc link, pdf, or any other link.
- The article should not be an initial draft or half-cooked, it should be a final polished article that you feel is ready to publish.
- While we have an open submission policy, we do not accept or publish all articles submitted to us. The last call on publishing stays with editors.
Finally, once you have published your first article with us, we will add you to the VisionWizard Medium publication as a contributor and you will be able to submit subsequent articles in future.[1]
