Article Submission Guidelines

Written by Mike Gold and editted by Nina Miller

C# Corner was founded by developers as a community for those with a common enthusiasm for .NET technologies. It was created as a place to share ideas, ask questions, search for answers, and learn about the many facets of .NET.  Over the years, C# Corner has become a popular venue for .NET professionals to submit articles on their areas of expertise. In its infancy, the site accepted and posted almost any morsel of information about .NET. The site has since grown to over 500,000 registered members from all over the globe. It's standards for submission have grown up as well. Today, C# Corner is dedicated to providing the highest quality content to its viewers. In pursuit of this goal, we invite you to follow the set of standards outlined below. The payoff is twofold: your article will almost certainly be posted, and people will recognize you as a legitimate author and .NET expert. These guidelines will also ensure that your article is taken seriously and will not be moved to the "how to" section of the site.

Guidelines to Writing your Article

1. Introduction

Every article should contain an introduction which establishes the subject that you will address. The introduction should summarize your topic and lead them into your article on the topic. It is helpful, although not essential, to use a conversational tone and to itemize the key points of the article.

If you have any article that is more like a tip or less than 2 pages, post it as a Blog entry on the Blogs section.

2. Numbering

All figures, listings, and tables should be numbered. Ideally, all figures should be labeled with a description. This may sound strict, but it is actually standard practice. Open any technical magazine (MSDN, Dr. Dobbs, Windows It Pro, Byte, etc.) and you will see that all figures, listings, and tables are labeled. The figures and listings are then referred to in the text of the article. For example, if you have three figures in an article, you can name them Figure 1, Figure 2, and Figure 3 respectively and when you are refering to them, you may write something like "See Figure 2". If you have source code at two places, you may want to call them Listing 1 and Listing 2 and in your article, you can refer something like "See Listing 1 for details".

3. Write Explanation

Try to avoid placing figures followed a sea of code with no explanation. This creates confusion and can quickly disconnect the reader from your article.

4. Comments

Explain the code in your listings and also comment them.  I've seen countless submissions where the article says:  "Here is my code", followed by 100 lines of uncommented code. That is not an article and it is a painful exercise for the reader to decipher.

5. Conclusion or Summary

Every article needs a conclusion. This can either be a summary of the article, your insight into further development, or a combination of both.  Again, try not to end your article with 100 lines of uncommented code.  It leaves the reader hanging in mid air. 

6. Proofreading 

Please have your articles proofread by a native English speaker before submission. The staff of C# Corner attempts to edit submissions for proper grammar, but this is extremely time consuming. We all have full time day jobs as programmers and it's very difficult to take on copyediting, as well. I've seen too many submissions squeeze by with poor grammar: misuse of articles, incorrect punctuation, sentences without verbs—in short, lacking basic English. You may be thinking, "It's a technical site, no one cares if the English is correct or not".  The truth is that poor grammar greatly detracts from the professionalism and credibility of the site. People reading the article might say to themselves, "Hey, if this person can't write accurately, then how do I know if their code is any good?" In the future we will have proofreaders who tackle some of these issues. But for now, please ask a proficient friend to check your article. 

7. Author Biography 

Submit a bio. I understand that some people wish to remain anonymous, but why?  Why not allow people to give you feedback on your article so that you can write a better one next time? Why not exchange ideas for other article topics?  The worst thing that can happen is that someone will "spam" you with a question about an article. This is certainly less offensive than all the spam you get from porn sites, identity thieves, stock picks, and generic drug companies each day. At least it's relevant to the work you do. Bios also allow your readers to attach a face and name to the content. The article will appear more legitimate coming from a real person instead of from some ghost in cyberspace. Ultimately, seeing people all over the world submitting articles and sharing a common interest of .NET programming enriches and enlivens the community.

8. Article Page Name

When you are creating a new article through the Content Publisher, you will be prompted for a page name that will be the name of the ASPX page published on the site. Try to keep this name short and meaningful. For example, if you are writing an article on how to read and write text files, your page name could be "ReadWriteTextFiles". Please avoid using names such as "1" or "abc".

9. Copying and Pasting Articles from a Word Document

Please DO NOT do this. Copying an article from a word document and pasting it into the Content Publisher is a "no no". Word adds a lot of unwanted HTML tags to the document. What you should do is copy and paste the contents of your word document into Notepad and then copy and paste the contents of Notepad into the Content Publisher. If you do not have time to do this, simply upload your word document instead and we will take care of posting your article.

10. Formatting Code

Conclusion

So I don't sound like a hypocrite, here is the forgone conclusion of this editorial: if you follow these simple, basic guidelines, you can't help but write a more readable article. If you are already following these guidelines, great! You'll probably find that your articles are being published 99.9 percent of the time and are also the most widely read. Keep up the great submissions. We have a seen a huge influx of authors and articles in the past few months and are happy to welcome them to the C# Corner community.  Articles by authors are what define the site, and we want to graciously thank those of you who have sacrificed your hard-earned time to contribute to our little corner of the .NET world.