Guidelines for Guest Scholar-Bloggers on GWP

Are you a scholar (or someone with their fingers on the pulse of current research about women or girls) seeking to enter the blogosphere and give blogging a try? Read on! Hey, if my grandmas (left) can do it, you can too.

Submission Process
Email me a 1-paragraph overview of the post you'd like to propose. When I greenlight it, please send the full post to me at deborahsiege AT gmail DOT com at least one day before you ideally would want me to run the post. Depending on how many submissions come in any a given week, I may not be able to run every post right away. But I will certainly do my best to try. Submissions should be pasted in the body of your email or attached as a MS Word document.

GUIDELINES FOR POSTING ON GIRL WITH PEN

SUBSTANCE. Girl with Pen is about bridging feminist research, popular reality, and the public. Posts should generally fall under this rubric. The best posts are those that are timely, unexpected, passionate, and somewhat personal.

LENGTH. The strongest blog posts read like mini, hypertexted op-eds. Op-eds are generally 700-1000 words; posts on Girl with Pen (and most blogs) are shorter (300-700 words max) and are very quick to get to the point.

TIMELY. Posts must have a news hook. A news hook can be new research (your own, or someone else's), an interesting news item, an event, an upcoming holiday or anniversary, a happening from pop culture, a popular assumption that’s the subject of current media coverage, or another article that is currently in the news. The news hook must come at the beginning of the post, to capture the scanning web reader’s attention.

UNEXPECTED. Go for the counterintuitive, that little known reality that is the opposite of what we all think! There are so many myths out there about the lives of women and girls. Set us straight. Clarify reality. Go beyond the obvious. Surprise us.

PASSIONATE. Tell us what you really think. If you care passionately, others will. Take a stand. Be controversial. Go out on a limb.

PERSONAL. Personal stories keep us reading. Include a personal anecdote or, if you aren’t comfortable writing about yourself, include an anecdote about someone else.

LINKS. Posts should include links. When submitting a post, if you're comfortable using the html code for links, please use it to embed your link in the text. If not, please include the link in brackets following the word(s) that you'd like to see in hypertext. Put the word(s) that you'd like to hypertext in bold.

EXAMPLE (w/o hypertext): Take the sentence “Please visit my website for more.” If I wanted the words “my website” to take the reader to my website’s homepage, I would write: Please visit my website [http://www.deborahsiegel.net] for more.

PICTURE AND BYLINE. Be sure to send a jpeg or gif (either a photo of you, or another relevant image related to the post) that you'd like to run with the post, along with a byline that includes your affiliation and anything else you'd like readers to know.

Questions? You can always post 'em in the comments section of this post, because chances are, others will be wondering the same thing. I'll run additional tips and tidbits in response.