Advice and guidance on blogging for the main Bath Spa website.

About the blog

The Bath Spa blog is a platform for individual voices and views from the University's community. Each post or article is unique, and contains either information or personal perspectives, in the writer’s own words. Topics are diverse, but are loosely grouped around life at Bath Spa, courses and subject areas, students and alumni, and research. The content we publish reflects our values, our impact and our personality.

Generally, our guest bloggers include Bath Spa University students, staff and alumni, and occasionally, organisations who work with the University to provide opportunities for our students.

Guest blogging offers several benefits, including:

  • Providing a link that you can add to your portfolio or CV
  • Gaining experience – in writing, photography, interviewing, and other skills.

We accept a broad range of post topics for inclusion on the Bath Spa blog, including:

  • Student experiences, tips and opinion pieces e.g. Lockdown lessons
  • Staff research interests and projects e.g. The history of the dog-ear
  • Tips for students from Professional Services staff e.g. Virtual job interviews

We don’t publish pieces of fictional creative writing on the blog; we’re looking for factual, opinion- or experience-based content.

Occasionally, we may decide not to publish a post. This can be for many reasons, including (but not limited to):

  • The topic is too niche or doesn’t make sense out of context
  • The content isn’t serving our audience with valuable information
  • The content has been published elsewhere, or contains copyrighted material
  • The topic might not be appropriate for our key audiences, which include school-aged children and young people
  • The contributors haven’t completed our consent form
  • The content doesn’t meet our requirements, for example image, audio or video quality.

Simply email it to external@bathspa.ac.uk noting that it's a guest blog post submission.

What happens after you submit?

After we’ve received your post, we’ll do the following:

First we decide if your content is appropriate for our audience (see "What we’re looking for" above).

When we edit your post, we do so to make sure that your writing:

  • Is in-keeping with our Style Guide and tone of voice
  • Meets our requirements in terms of language and content
  • Is as polished and professional as possible, while remaining friendly
  • Is accessible, well-structured and web-appropriate.

We may also add an introduction to the post to outline the content you’ve included.

We’ll either crop and treat the images you submitted along with the post, or we’ll select our own.

We will only publish images that you own the rights to and that you permit us to use, and we need consent from everyone who features in, or whose work is featured, in your images.

We’ll decide when to publish your post based on the other content that has been submitted for the blog.

If you have a specific publish date in mind, we recommend that you submit the post to us at least two weeks before this date. Even then, we can’t guarantee that we’ll publish on that date.

When it’s live, we’ll send you a link to your published work.

General advice and tips

A good post should be valuable but concise – this isn’t an academic essay! As a guide, try to submit something that’s between 500 and 1,000 words.

Please send your post as a Word document or Google doc. We’ll need:

  • Short title
  • Long title
  • Lead-in copy
  • Conclusion
  • Bio

There’s no need to include HTML tags in your copy – please use standard formatting in your document. If quotes are included, please use quotation marks (“ ”) to show this.

Please make sure you tell us who you are and how you’re connected to the University. For example, if you’re a student, please tell us what course you’re studying and your current year of study.

Don’t forget to include links to your personal blog, social media channels or project website. We can’t always include every link but we’ll do our best to let readers know how they can connect with you.

We may polish your post a little, but it’ll still be yours. For this reason, if your post needs to be extensively rewritten, we may decide not to publish it. That said, we realise that not everyone is an experienced writer, so please don’t be discouraged if we edit. Here’s a checklist to help you get your post ready for submission:

  • Run a spelling and grammar check
  • Divide your writing into clear sections and give each a descriptive heading
  • Use contractions, i.e. “we’re” not “we are”; “you’re” not “you are”
  • Speak directly to the reader, using friendly, active language
  • Read your post aloud – does it make sense? Is there something you need to clarify or reword? Sometimes a friend can provide 'fresh eyes'.

If you interview or quote other people – whether from the Bath Spa community or beyond – it is your responsibility to get their sign-off on the final post, as you are publishing their words publicly.

Remember that students, alumni and people from outside the University must complete our consent form if you feature their personal details or intellectual property in the post. This includes names and contact details, photographs of people’s work, the photography itself, and photos in which people can be recognised.

If you’d like the consent form link, please email web@bathspa.ac.uk. 

If you include facts or statistics in your post, or refer to other posts/articles, please provide a link to the original source (or a reference for a printed source).

In general, we steer clear of promises such as “more like this coming soon” or “we’ll be posting about this regularly”.

If you’d like to publish a series of posts around a specific topic, or if you’re a writer-in-residence engaged to produce content for a specific project, please provide your completed posts in batches of six. Generally, we won’t publish the posts in your series more frequently than once a month.

Remember: we can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to publish your content. If in doubt, please get in touch to discuss your plans before you start: web@bathspa.ac.uk. We're here to help.

Our writing is friendly, direct, informal, inclusive, accessible and positive. We avoid technical and specialist jargon, opting instead for clarity.

We don't publish profane language that could impact how our website appears in search results. We also don't publish content that is threatening, offensive, abusive, intimidating or insulting – our goal is to illuminate, to include and to build a thriving community, both on- and offline.

We won’t check edits with you before we publish; the decision is ours and is final.