Helium’s Writing Standards
Helium welcomes everyone and anyone to share insights, knowledge and creativity on our site. Helium is an open platform for recognition and reward. We strive to make Helium a safe, inviting and fun experience for everyone.
We also care a lot about quality. Helium’s success is dependent on the quality and quantity of effort that is put forward collectively by its community. When you join Helium, you are joining something that is bigger than any one of us. We are building a free, valuable and rich resource of knowledge for the benefit of all.
We ask our members to put their best efforts forward. Helium is not a blogging site. Helium is not designed for short personal anecdotes or personal diary entries. Think of each of your submissions to Helium as an article worthy of publication in your favorite magazine.
Helium is based on a fair, trusted and democratic rating engine that elevates the best content on the site. If your article is ranked in the bottom half of an article thread, we welcome and encourage you to use the Leapfrog feature to substantially improve your article. If your current work is not rated the best, we hope you will continue to compete for the top spot through Leapfrog or by writing new articles.
In addition to asking you to give us your best, we require these Helium Writing Standards:
- Do not include your name or any specific reference to yourself or your company in your article. To preserve the integrity of our rating system, we cannot allow any reference to you in your article that could be used to influence the rating process. Helium encourages you to fill out your “About Me” page by providing links to your blog and website and adding other autobiographical information there.
- Do not use your article to disparage (or praise) another writer’s article. The place for helpful critiques is in the Community boards. Each article on Helium should stand alone as a discrete and meaningful piece, focused on addressing the topic at hand.
- Articles must be 400 words at minimum while we strongly encourage 1,500 words at maximum. Overly long pieces tend not to do well in rating. Please do take care with spelling and grammar as well as accepted sentence structure.
- The content you post must be your own. Plagiarism will result in suspension of your account.
- We reserve the right to edit titles. We do this to increase a topic’s chances of being found by search engines and to make the title fit our style.
- No adult content, hate content or profanity is allowed in either Helium articles or in postings in the Helium Discussion Board section.
- Duplicate articles are not allowed. If titles are similar, writers may reuse some information, but articles must be rewritten so that the information is focused clearly on the specific title.
To get the best formatting for your article:
- Single space your paragraphs. Use one blank line between paragraphs.
- Don’t submit articles that are one giant paragraph. It’s hard to read, it does not do well in the rating process and it looks like a lame blog post. Format articles so that there are paragraph breaks, like one would find in a professional magazine or newspaper.
- To retain formatting, we strongly advise you to write your article in Word or another word-processing program. Then save a copy of your final version in plain text. Paste the plain text version into the Helium text box.
