Blogs style guide

This style guide is intended to help you prepare a guest blog post for the CSCCE blog. After submission, we will edit your post for consistency with previous posts, but referring to this guide before submission will expedite the editorial process.

In general we will adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style for grammar when editing blog posts (available here via personal subscription or through your institution’s library).

Blog format

Blog posts follow the following general format:

Title

Author credit

  • Your name will be mentioned in the teaser paragraph, and in the “About the author” section at bottom of post (see below).
  • The teaser paragraph should highlight the topics in the post as this will appear on the CSCCE blog homepage.

Teaser paragraph

This will automatically be in P1 font (larger than the regular font). Try to limit to 2 sentences or so rather than a full paragraph and include your name.

Subheadings

  • Subheadings can be used to break your post up into sections, but are not required.
  • Subheadings are all H2.
  • You have the option of including section headers at the H3 and H4 level if you wish.

Links

  • Hyperlink words, wherever possible rather than pasting raw URLs.
  • Remove marketing tags, if applicable.

Images

  • Always check provenance of image and that we have permission to use it on the CSCCE blog. This may involve reaching out to the creator for permission or linking to an open/public domain source.
  • Add credit in caption e.g. “Image credit: CSCCE.”

References, resources, and further reading

You are welcome to include a references or resources section. For journal articles, please use the following format:

Corpas M, Gehlenborg N, Janga SC, Bourne PE (2008) Ten simple rules for organizing a scientific meeting. PLoS Comput Biol doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000080

When referencing web articles/blog posts, please use the following format: 
Woodley L (2014) All together now: Event formats for networking. Social in silico

About the author

When submitting your guest blog post, please include a short bio.

E.g., Katie is a science communicator and community manager with a background in biological research. In her role at CSCCE, she is working to develop and share the center’s products as well as champion and support our community of practice. In 2017, Katie participated in the Community Engagement Fellows Program.

Additional formatting information

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Only use abbreviations for terms that are used more than twice in the text. Introduce abbreviations or acronyms in parentheses after spelling out the first occurrence, for example, community manager (CM) or US National Science Foundation (NSF).

Always spell out the word “and”, except in cases where “&” is an official part of a proper name.

When referencing CSCCE, spell it out the first time and from thereon use the abbreviation. There is no need to use the parenthetical (CSCCE) in the first occasion.

Dates and Times

Dates should be written Day Month Year, without commas separating each unit, for example, 29 April 2020. When including a date, use this format: Thursday, 29 April 2020.

Please use the following format for times: 10:30am / 9:15pm

American vs. British spellings

For headings, please use American spellings. All other text in a guest blog post can remain as the author normally writes.