Blog guidelines

A blog should be a minimum of 500 words and a maximum of 1,500. A blog is personal. It's your take on the world. So, make it about you and how you see things.

The most important point is that you know why you're writing it. Who is your audience? What are you telling them?

Use everyday language. Think about it as a conversation with someone. You're sitting in a cafe telling someone about … whatever it is that your blog is about. 

You can be serious. You can be entertaining. That all depends on the theme of your blog. But always be engaging.

Plain English

We advocate the use of plain English and simple sentence structure. Use short sentences. Or, at least, a mix of short and longer sentences. You can use a platform such as Hemingway Editor to help guide you.

You should avoid words and phrases that people won’t recognise - or provide an explanation if you can’t avoid it. Plus explain all abbreviations and acronyms, unless they are well known and in common use, such as UK, EU or VAT.

You should have an introductory paragraph (standfirst), which explains who you are and the gist of what you're talking about. This can be in the third person (she is...). And then the main section would be in the first person (I am ...).

We break our blogs up with regular sub-headings so, by all means, add some in as you go.

Read some of our other blogs on the University of Derby blog site to get an idea of what is required.

Create your profile

If you have a staff profile on the site, we can use this as your blog profile. If not, we will need an author profile (via the author form) and a good quality head and shoulders image. For the image, we ideally need a candid-style image (not a selfie, not looking directly at the camera), for example of you in conversation (with someone off camera). This needs to be a high-resolution image that can be cropped square 2000x2000 pixels.

We also need a quality image to go along with your blog. It is important that the image is eye-catching and is evocative of the ideas in the blog. It's the first thing people see either on the blog site or when the blog is shared on social media or email communications.  This needs to be a high-resolution image that can be cropped to 2000x1500 pixels.