Author guidelines
How to write an amazing blog post?
How to write an amazing blog post about your research?
Always keep in mind that you are writing for a laymen audience, so keep it short and simple.
The ideal blog post includes:
- a catchy and suitable title
- a clear introduction to the topic, preferably using an appealing example
- what did you study and why (e.g. research question or hypothesis)
- how did you do it (no technical details please; you may refer to our "About" page if you like)
- importance / relevance of your findings
Other requirements:
- max. 500 words
- language: English for laymen (!)
- submission deadline: [x] weeks before publishing deadline
General tips about content:
- the contents should cover a current topic, be important and novel
- it should attract attention from a wide audience
- or it should be from an important source (authority)
Tips & Tricks about writing/presenting:
- Keep it simple! (avoid jargon)
- Emphasize societal relevance
- Use real world examples (possibly through quotes)
- Repeat your main point if necessary
- It might be helpful to ask at least one person representative of the intended audience to review your entry and point out phrases or concepts they don’t understand to help you to evaluate whether all the necessary information has been included and explained adequately.
Useful links:
- The up goer 5 challenge: original and resulting challenge
- The media communications department of the RU
- Plain English writing guide. The tips to get started on page 2-3 are very helpful!
- How to write a lay summary (guidelines from page 4)
- How to write about your science
Labeling your post: categories and tags
Categories are meant for setting the language and broad grouping of your posts. First of all, set the language from the pop-up menu to 'Nederlands' or 'English'. This way, people can select to see only blog entries in that language. Furthermore, think of these as general topics or the table of contents for your site. Categories are there to help identify what your blog is really about. It is to assist readers finding the right type of content on your site. Categories are hierarchical, so we can sub-categorize. For our purposes, we can use categories like Presentations (for talks and conference posters/talks), Papers (new publications), In the media (interviews).
Tags are meant to describe specific details of your posts. Think of these as index words. They are the micro-data that you can use to micro-categorize your content. Tags are not hierarchical. These are some rules of thumb for tags in our posts:
- Tag the language of the post: English/Nederlands
- Use tags as keywords for the contents. For Roshan's TEDx talk, tags are 'TEDxRadboud', 'scientific integrity', 'fundamental science', 'video', 'English' (category = Presentations).
