1. Introduction to Writing for TruthScript
Welcome! Thank you for considering writing for TruthScript. We strive to glorify God through the written word, encourage His saints, and reach others with the hope of Christ. Before submitting an article to TruthScript, please visit our About page, read our statement of faith, and be sure that you are able to completely affirm it.
2. What Content is TruthScript Publishing?
TruthScript’s stated vision is to “encourage Christians to not be conformed to the world, but instead transformed by the renewing of their minds.” The categories for TruthScript content are going to be fairly broad, but here are some general areas that we’re focusing on:
- Church: What duties, roles, and privileges does the church have? What is its role in God’s plan for creation, and what impact is it meant to have on society? What current issues does the church face?
- Culture: Covering issues related to our society and culture. While this often will involve engaging with the excesses and sins of the culture we inhabit, it’s very much worth thinking in a positive light as well – what is redeeming, true, good, and valuable
– what has God blessed us with? How can we honor God with how we live, act, etc. – through our habits and traditions?
- Family: What does God have to say about marriage, family, child-rearing, etc. – especially applying biblical principles to these areas? In a time of great upheaval and dysfunction, how does God’s plan for marriage and the family offer a safe haven from the storms of the secular world?
- Media: Book, movie, music reviews – well-known content, but also items that deserve to be elevated or promoted.
- Theology: In general, this would refer to core doctrines as stated in our statement of faith, which is a good guide for what theological issues and doctrines would be best to write about.
*While there are definitely going to be politically orientated articles, in general, we’d like to stay in the context of the church/individual Christian.
**TruthScript is not a polemics website or discernment blog – we’re focusing more on equipping and encouraging the regular Christian.
***If writing about an apologetic-related issue, try to keep things simple enough so that a standard layman can follow.
3. Notes on Formatting and Grammar
Here are a few notes on basic editing/formatting for a TruthScript Article:
- ABSOLUTELY NO PLAGIARISM UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES — All work needs to be original.
- Level: TruthScript is not a seminary publication – we want to encourage the standard Christian, so it’s best to keep things fairly straightforward. That being said, we would like to strive for excellence in writing, so not every article will be published.
- Citations: If you have a quote from a specific source (not a general quote, like “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”) then an easy way to cite it is simply to insert a metalink. If it’s a print source, then simply list the work in italics along with the author.
- Length: While there may be special posts on occasion that are either longer or shorter, articles should generally be not less than 700 words, and not more than 1500.
- No Double Spaces: One space between words is sufficient!
- Bite Size Chunks: Try to keep paragraphs generally 3-5 sentences long with headings that break up the article into bite-sized chunks.
- Include a meta description. At the end of your submission, insert a meta description if possible. This is simply a short, extremely brief description of the article (Around 160 characters, so essentially a Twitter post).
- Include a short biography (no more than a short paragraph) and headshot.
- Oxford Comma: The Oxford comma has been phased out in some institutions, but is still standard enough that we’d prefer that you use it!
4. What to Expect After Submitting
Once you’ve sent in your article, we will do our best to let you know when it will be posted, if we’ve decided not to post it, or if we’re not going to post it yet. Before it’s posted, it will be looked over by one of our editors and approved by someone on our board. If it only requires a few grammatical changes then we’ll just let you know when it’s going to be live on TruthScript.com. If there are more extensive edits needed, we will send it back to you for approval before posting.
Thanks for your interest in TruthScript! May God bless you as you conform to the image of Christ!