Write for Towards Data Science
By: Tds Editors
Tags: Writers’ Guide, Join Us, Tds Team, Writers Guide

Guidelines

How to get your article ready for publication!

We aim to strike a balance between innovating, informing and philosophizing. We want to hear from you! But we do ask that if you are not a professional writer, you consider the following points when you prepare your article. We want to publish high quality, professional articles that people want to read.

Please be aware that if you don’t follow our submission guidelines, your article won’t be accepted.

1. Is your story a story that needs to be told?

Before you start writing, ask yourself: is this story a story that needs to be told?

If you have read many articles addressing the same issue or explaining the same concept, think twice before writing another one. If you have a radical, new take on an old chestnut, we want to hear from you… but, we need you to persuade us that your article is something special that distinguishes itself from the pack and speaks to our audience.

Conversely, if your article addresses an underserved area or presents a new idea or method, that’s just what we are after!

2. What is your message?

Let us know what your ‘take home message’ is, right from the start. Give your piece a snappy introduction that tells us:

What is your novel idea?

Why should we care?

How are you going to prove your point?

Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can be as conversational as you like, but keep calling back to the central message and give us a solid conclusion.

Remember though, Towards Data Science is not your personal blog, keep it sharp and on-topic!

3. On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog

You’ve got a new idea or a new way of doing things, you want to tell the community and start a discussion. Fantastic, that’s what we want too, but we’re not going to take for granted that you know what you are talking about or that we should uncritically believe what you say… you’ve got to persuade us (your audience) that:

The subject matter is important

There is a gap that needs to be filled

You have the answer

Your solution works

Your idea is based on a logical progression of ideas and evidence

If you are giving us a tutorial, tell us why people would need to use this tool and why your way is better than the methods already published.

You can do this by explaining the background, showing examples, providing an experiment or just laying out how data you have extracted from various sources allowed you to synthesise this new idea.

Are there arguments that counter your opinion or your findings? Explain why that interpretation conflicts with your idea and why your idea comes out on top.

4. Do you have a short title with an insightful subtitle?

If you scroll up to the top of this page, you will see an example of a title and subtitle. Your post needs to have a short title and a longer subtitle that tell readers what your article is about or why they should read it. Your header is useful for attracting potential readers and making your intentions clear. To remain consistent and give readers the best experience possible, we do not allow titles or subtitles written in all-caps. We also ask that you avoid profanity in both your title and subtitle.

When your subtitle is directly under the title and formatted correctly, it will show up in some post previews, which helps with your click-through rate. To correctly format your subtitle on Medium, type it out, highlight the text and then click the smaller of the two Ts in the popup window.

5. What value do you deliver to your readers?

Make sure your post achieves its purpose. For instance, if your goal is to explain several concepts, ensure that these concepts are bared to their essentials, narrated in an orderly sequence and illustrated with simple and accurate analogies.

Second, use concrete language and visual imagery. As Steven Pinker puts it in his book The Sense of Style: “We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions.” and he continues “Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images”.

Third, work to improve your writing skills. You could start by replacing linking and light verbs such as ‘to be, is, going, become, bring, make, take, have’, by more precise action verbs. For example, you could say ‘agile’ instead of ‘going fast’. There is plenty of great advice on the internet.

Finally, check for spelling, punctuation and grammatical mistakes. If you can’t do it yourself, use Grammarly and then ask a friend to help you. As we are such a small team, we can’t correct every submission.

6. Is your code well displayed?

Please don’t screenshot your code but use one of these two other solutions:

Medium’s native code blocks & inline code

Embed GitHub gists

If you paste a code within your article, be sure to explain it so all your readers can follow what you are doing.

7. Check your facts

Whenever you provide a fact, if it’s not self-evident, let us know where you learned it. Tell us who your sources are and where your data originated. If we want to have a conversation we all need to be on the same page. Maybe something you say will spark a discussion, but if we want to be sure we are not at cross purposes, we need to go back to the original and read for ourselves in case we are missing a vital piece of the puzzle that makes everything you say make sense.

8. Is your conclusion to the point and not promotional?

Please make sure that you include a conclusion at the end of your article. It’s a great way to help your readers review and remember the essential points or ideas you’ve covered. You can also use your conclusion to link an original post or a few relevant articles.

Please do not request claps and donations and don’t include more than three links to previously published articles. Readers know that they can click on your profile to see all your posts and they know that they can follow you, so there is no need to request it.

For your references, please respect this format:

[X] N. Name, Title (Year), Source

For example, your first reference should look like this:

[1] A. Pesah, A. Wehenkel and G. Louppe, Recurrent Machines for Likelihood-Free Inference (2018), NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Meta-Learning

9. Are your tags precise enough?

The more specific your tags, the easier it is for readers to find your article and for us to classify and recommend your post to the relevant audience.

Depending on the tags you choose, your post will be featured on our data science, machine learning, programming or visualization page. Please choose precise tags as we can’t allow a post to be in all our categories at once.

We may change one or two tags before publication. We would do this only to keep our different sections relevant to our readers. For instance, we would want to avoid tagging a post on linear regression as “Artificial Intelligence”.

10. Do you have an amazing image?

A great image attracts and excites readers. That’s why all the best newspapers always display incredible pictures.

This is what you can do to add a fantastic featured image to your post:

Use Unsplash. Most of the content on Unsplash is released under Creative Commons CC0, which means their photos are safe to use without asking for permission — even for commercial purposes.

Take one yourself . Your phone is almost certainly good enough to capture a cool image of your surroundings. You might even already have an image on your phone that would make a great addition to your article.

. Your phone is almost certainly good enough to capture a cool image of your surroundings. You might even already have an image on your phone that would make a great addition to your article. Make a great graph. If your post involves data analysis, spend some time making at least one graph truly unique. You can try R, Python, D3.js or Plotly.

If you decide to purchase a license for an image to be used in your article, please note that we only allow the use of images under a license that: (i) does not expire; and (ii) that can be used for commercial purposes on the TDS Publication. You are responsible for ensuring you comply with the license terms of use. You must also include a caption below the image, as follows, or as otherwise required by the license provider: “Image via [license provider’s name] under license to [your name].” Finally, please email us a copy of a receipt or other evidence of the purchased license, along with the corresponding license terms of use.

Please remember to cite the source of your images even if you aren’t legally obligated to do so. If you created an image yourself, you can add (Image by author) in the caption. Whichever way you decide to go, your image source should look like this: