Firstly, thank you for your interest in drafting an article for the website – we are very grateful.
Please note submission of an article does not guarantee publication but content will be used, as a minimum, as a resource and guide to help future content development.
We suggest you start by researching several relevant internet articles (or books you may have) and then précis/combine these into a well rounded article that reflects all the main opinions and issues.
Please be impartial and don’t base content around personal opinions – you can say things like “many people find this useful” but bear in mind everyone is different and different things work for different people.
Please don’t just copy and paste large portions from other websites because of copyright issues, but yes you can copy up to a whole paragraph if you use a suitable citation/reference.
But – in general – we suggest you paraphrase and amalgamate the best of other internet article into our own words. Short sections and sentences can be copied where needed.
For a typical article we suggest up to 1100 -1400 words in length.
There is a website to count words at https://wordcounter.net. Just paste your content in and the word count displays.
It is great to have one or two images/graphics within any document but don’t worry too much about positioning the graphic as it depends what we can manage with HTML. If it’s easier just send us any image as a separate file (or just send us an internet link to where the image resides).
Its also great to have a youtube video if you can find something suitable on the given topic. Just send us the youtube link if you are unsure how to add hyperlinks yourself.
Please reference all the websites links used to source information at the bottom of your article under “References”. It doesn’t need to be Harvard style references or anything complicated – just an easy link/reference to any internet articles that were particularly useful.
Feel free to add any information from any books you have read and – if you are using a particular book extensively – add that to your list of references.
What’s the difference between a reference and an in-text citation? citations are the short citations e.g. (McEwan, 2022) or (1) that you include in the written text that help a reader understand any key sources you are quoting or referring to in your writing. Typically a citation will refer to a fuller reference placed at in the reference list at the end of an article.
Some potential sources of info (alongside google):
1 – The free pdf at https://martinantony.com/wp-content/uploads/10-Simple-Solutions-to-Shyness.pdf
2 – Good SA info at https://www.aboutsocialanxiety.com/social-anxiety/ search for a particular topic/word in the site search box it usually comes up with something. The search box is at the bottom of the left hand column.
3 – Good SA info at https://www.verywellmind.com. You can search for a particular topic/word in the site search box in top right hand corner (the magnifying glass symbol) e.g. type “social anxiety and children” and a list of their articles will appear.
4 -Good SA info at Western Australia CCI – Resources
5 – See these other Social anxiety websites : Social Anxiety Weblinks
And, of course, just googling the theme of your article will provide many options! 🙂
Please try to avoid repetition of other articles on the website – for instance – if you need to mention “avoidance” or “safety behaviours” its best to say “Please see the SAAUK page on Avoidance and Safety Behaviours
To get a feel of other articles on the website – see the list of topics thar are already started – just go to www.socialanxietyalliance.org.uk and click the “topics” link
If you havn’t already done so please let us know which article you intend to work on (before you start) so we can avoid duplication
It doesn’t matter in which format you create the article e.g. a word doc/pdf/html/plain text etc as we will have to convert the article to HTML and change formatting etc as part of the review process.
Please don’t spend a long time formatting your article (fonts, layout etc) as conversion to HTML we will lose most of the formatting subtleties anyway.
Articles we will be passed to our CBT specialist and other members of the small editorial team.
As said, submission of an article does not guarantee publication but content will be used, as a minimum, as a resource and guide to help future content development.
Please send your article to volunteer@socialanxietyalliance.org.uk
Many thanks again for your help! Good Luck 🙂