These are the author guidelines for submitting a guest post to LightSwitch!. The first, and most important thing is to check and see if your planned article is appropriate for the blog. Contact a member of the Leadership Team through the Meetup and submit a short proposal (~50 words or less) via the email tool in Meetup. You do not have to be a member of the club, but the club does reserve the right to refuse articles. Any article that you propose must, at the end of the day, be useful to Fort Wayne Inventors Club members regardless of your status as a member of the club or not.

The article should be approximately 300 words long, grammatically correct, well-written, and follow the “inverted pyramid” style with the most important points up front and supporting information with more detail, in the body of the article. Do not include marketing-related links and the article should not be self-promotional. Images submitted for inclusion with an article should be in the public domain (e.g., Wikimedia Commons) or owned by the author. The Fort Wayne Inventors Club website will not use images that require requests for permission to use.

The nature of the article will determine if sources are appropriate. If they are, cite the source in the text (e.g., “according to a recent US Government IT report”) and include the full citation (APA format) or a link to an online resource (e.g., Wikipedia) at the end of the article. (The full citation is not included in the word count.) This is not an academic report, so we do not need a formal citation in the text, but by the same token, if you refer to someone else’s work, we want to make sure they are acknowledged. If you are citing a website source be sure to include the URL so it can be linked it directly to your entry. Make sure the links work before you submit your entry.

Articles may include links to a personal or business website as part of a brief (3-4 sentences) author’s bio. The bio will be published at the end of the article and is not included in the overall word count. Ensure that the article is your own work and that it has not been previously published elsewhere.