Our Guidelines for Guest Writer Submissions

When you reflect on your own, you are accountable to yourself. When you blog, you are accountable to yourself and others. Others need to hear your voice.” – George Couros, The Principal of Change

MiddleWeb welcomes guest article submissions from teachers, school leaders, bloggers and book authors with helpful things to say about teaching, learning and leading in the middle grades.

Browse our past articles and you’ll see that we’re interested in a wide variety of topics, from technology infusion to social-emotional learning, from student-driven classrooms to using standards effectively. We’re eager to learn more about social justice, parent-school connections, cutting-edge teaching & leadership strategies, and the teaching life.

Have you written an article for ASCD or similar publications and received a note saying, “We liked it, but we just don’t have space”? Try us! Our mission is to share the voices and insights of educators with a grades 4-8 focus. (Option: If you are more interested in reviewing books, see these guidelines.)

Just so you know: We do not respond to solicitations from writers working for online-marketing websites.

Tips and guidelines

1. Read our site. Look at some of the articles we’ve published. You’ll soon get a sense of the writing style we prefer. Our chief guideline is the same for articles, book reviews and interviews: Tell our visitors what YOU would want to know if you were the reader, looking for ideas, insight, inspiration and collegiality.

2. Don’t obsess about length — we suggest 800-1200 words for articles, but if we feel you’ve written too much or too little, we’ll suggest ways to expand or contract.

SUPER TIPS! This November 2020 article at the Harvard Business Review – Write to Reward Your Reader – synthesizes current research about effective writing – the kind that attracts, engages and informs today’s readers. We’re sharing it with all our contributors and highly recommend it to you!

3. Write in a relaxed, personal voice. Be professional but don’t feel compelled to write your MiddleWeb post like a grad school paper or journal article. Humor is good. Graphics, photos, video and other multimedia might be appropriate. We will select some if you don’t provide. Embed links as needed.

4. Avoid harsh sarcasm or personal attacks. But feel free to criticize ideas and practices and offer a better way.

5. We love writers who tell stories from your own experience as an educator (or learner or parent, etc.) and relate those stories in ways that will be useful to educators and others. If you’re writing about your teaching or leadership practices, remember that your audience is less interested in your professional life than they are in what they can learn from your professional experience. It’s not much fun to read an article about education where the writer is mostly swimming in his or her own fishbowl, oblivious to the outside world. That said, articles about the teaching (or leadership) life that build empathy with others can be effective.

6. Be careful about identifying students. We depend on writers to assure that they, their school, or their school system have the necessary permissions for students’ names and/or images to appear in articles. We prefer that you use pseudonyms for students and indicating such in the articles you submit to us. Students pictured in images you supply should not be recognizable unless you have signed releases.

7. If you are a published author of books related to education and the middle grades, we will consider an excerpt or spinoff article. If we agree to publish, we’ll feature your book cover (and link to book site) as part of the post. MiddleWeb contributors retain the ownership of their writing; we ask for exclusive use for three weeks from our date of publication.

While MiddleWeb is not in a position to pay for articles, we can promise visibility and readership. Many of our posts are highlighted by editors of other online publications and services, including Edutopia, Cult of Pedagogy, MindShift and the popular SmartBrief education newsletters. including our own Middle Grades SmartBrief. Attention-grabbing posts will garner 4000-5000 reads or more. The record so far is 428,000!

Other writing tips

In an interview with Matt Huston in Psychology Today, Harvard professor Steven Pinker shared this insight from his book, The Sense of Style (Viking, 2014).

The main impediment to good writing, says Pinker, is that people “assume too much, use jargon and abbreviations that their readers have no way of deciphering, fail to present background information that’s critical to understanding the passage, and describe things at too high a level of abstraction.”

They’re falling prey, he says, to the “curse of knowledge” – they know something and fail to put themselves into the shoes of a reader who doesn’t.

For more valuable insights from this research, see How to Be a Better Writer: 6 Tips from Harvard’s Steven Pinker.

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Have article proposals, queries or questions? Send them to co-editor John Norton at ask.middleweb@gmail.com. We prefer to receive a query before articles are submitted. Either can be sent to this email address.