General Notes

Articles written for XPlace Magazine use a casual, conversational tone, though not at the cost of coherence or accuracy. True subject matter experts neither resort to excessive formality or excessive informality to demonstrate their authority of a topic. If you write with XPlace’s audience in mind and sound like your natural self, you’re pretty much where you should be style-wise.

Keep Your Intros Snappy

People’s attentions spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter. They’re looking for the bottom line, that fresh nugget, your main point. So you should neither beat around the bush nor strive for the academic totality of a post-doc dissertation. Just keep the momentum focused on your message to avoid losing the reader’s attention.

If your article solves a pain, start by stating the pain. Don’t warm up to your main point by prefacing it with generalizations. You don’t need to tell our readers that Neil Armstrong was the first to person to walk on the moon before getting to your point.

Using Metaphors

Using metaphors can often help readers better grasp an idea, but if not used properly, may confuse readers and steal the spotlight from your main topic. So unless you can bake ’em in just right, avoid overextending their use in your article. 

Keep Your Readers in Mind

Both ninja and newbie freelancers read XPlace Magazine. If you over-simplify or dumb-down your article, you might offend our readers. So keep it intelligent and, if necessary, invest time in defining any vague terms and provide relevant background info, even if as a link.

Clarity First

Ensure your content is straightforward. Don’t use nonessential jargon, complex phrasings, ambiguous concepts, and buzzwords. Be succinct and avoid needless verbiage. Ensure your pronouns point at their referents without ambiguity. Keep a healthy written pace and strive for accurate demonstrations of your concepts. Avoid the use of awkward idioms and restrict any pop culture references to non-vital points; no reader should be expected to recognize a particular song or movie to understand your main point.

Author Bios & Photos

Final drafts of your article should include a brief summary describing the author’s background (a bio) and a presentable photo. Bios should be 40 to 50 words long and may include a link or two. They should be informative, snappy, and brief.

Examples:

James “Jimmie” Green is a designer-slash-developer working as a freelancer via XPlace in New York. Jimmie is a member of the jQuery Mobile team, an active member of the open source community, and enjoys a complicated relationship with JavaScript and HTML5. He’s probably flipping out about something on Twitter as we speak.

Rafael “Raffi” Vara is an illustrator/designer from Paris, France. He spends the majority of his days maintaining his XPlace Profile, and drafting imaginary characters for imaginary VR games. It is rumored he is allergic to rude people, but that is largely unconfirmed. You can see Raffi’s portfolio here.

Author photos don’t need to be professional portraits, but should look polished and presentable. XPlace Magazine will prepare them for publication, so you can also send them as raw files with a minimum size of 400px by 400px.