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
- Who is our audience?
- What do they know?
- What do we want them to know?
- How do we want them to think differently?
- How can typography encourage curiosity and exploration?
Style
- Write something you’d like to read
- Aim for informal sophistication
- Demonstrate your expertise through description AND analysis
- Compose informative topic sentences that provide a clear progression through the essay
Essay Requirements (and percent of each essay grade)
- Citations. Along with the analysis contained in your essay, citations are the primary indication of the breadth and depth of your research. You should have around 5 original historical sources and 5 secondary sources. You should list relevant websites, but not count them as official sources. Your research must be your own. (40%)
- Engaging writing, engaging the above questions, with minimal use of passive voice. (20%)
- Images with descriptive captions. Images must be appropriately sized, fit into the page, and of sufficient quality for web publication. Use images not merely as eye candy, but to visually communicate the main points of your story. All images must be uploaded in jpg format in the images folder. (15%)
- Clearly stated goal/relevance for each section (see questions above). (10%)
- Meaningful headings that provide clear structure and ideally communicate main points. (5%)
- Pull quotes, sidebars, and jumbotron heading in all essays. (5%)
- One essay must use the wide-col layout. (5%)
- Consistent use of bold and italics. Don’t use either too often; you’ll negate the effect of highlighting something. Do not use either for references; leave those as unformatted text. (5%)
- All essays (combined) are 50% of total writing grade;
Blurbs and Summaries
- Blurbs are ~200 words (30% total writing grade).
- Summaries are ~600 words (20% total writing grade).
- Both must have a H1 (#) and H2 (##) headers to populate the map pop-up.
- Both require the same level of research and citation care as essays!
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
- 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.