Writing Guide

This page provides a writing guide for the content you’re creating, outlines the minimum requirements for your essays, and explains how you will be evaluated on your website contributions. For more technical information about layouts, see the sample layouts menu in the nav bar.

Questions to keep in mind

Style

Essay Requirements (and percent of each essay grade)

Blurbs and Summaries

Google Sheets

We are using two Google Sheets to organize metadata for our content. These are integral to the site functioning properly. The following sheet is used to generate content for the directory page:

The title and teaser columns show up on the cards, and the page slug should match the title of your content page. Obviously, image-slug determines the image. Technically, these images come are loaded from a separate folder /images/cards/, which we automatically generate from the image you upload to the images folder. You do not need to upload anything else for the images on the cards.

The following sheet is used to display the outlines on the map page, as well as the content in the popups.

You need to provide a KML file (in the kml folder, naturally) for each of your pages. This spreadsheet enables your KML files to appear on the map; relevant-pages in the spreadsheet column allow the various rows in the popup to appear. You can link pages by separating them with a comma. Aim for two or three. The image is automatically generated from the first image on the linked page. All pages must have at least one image.

All work due April 28!

Citations

For inline citations, we will use author date notation (Smith 1975, 13). Do not cite webpages as primary sources! Find the original historical source, and cite that instead. If you need to respond to something on the webpage itself (as opposed some historical source it discusses), then, and only then, should you cite the webpage. You won’t have a page number, but you’ll still have author and date. If you can’t find a date, use “n.d.” (for no date).

Be as specific and consistent as you can with your citations, even though some of your historical sources may require some improvising.

Sources

At the end of your essay, you should list the full bibliographic entry for your source to complement the inline citations that appear in the text. Use an second-level heading that says “Sources” (with no colon) at the top of this section.

Image Credits

Provide descriptive phrases for your captions, and use the first few words as a “key” that you can use in your Image Credits section (also a second-level heading). Do not use images that you don’t have permission to use. As with in-text references, you must provide detailed citations to your image source. This means that you cannot simply reuse an image you’ve found online unless you have a specific reference for it.

Section Headings

Do not use bold in your headings; use an appropriate heading level (as shown below). We can create new styles if need be. For your reference, all the headings styles are demonstrated below. Remember that you must have a space between the ### and the actual heading!

# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3
#### Heading 4
##### Heading 5

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Lists

- item 1
- item 2
  - put two spaces in front of your dash to sub-indent
- item 3

Site Layouts and Typography

For more on how to achieve certain layout effects, please see the various sample essays; they each contain the code snippets you can copy and paste into your own page.

Further Reference

If you can’t find what you need on the sample pages, please consult the Markdown basic writing and formatting guide. And bring questions to class, both technical and broader design questions.