Article Types

Please note that these fees and word counts are general guidelines; when emailing you about an assignment, your editor will clarify the article type and fee, as well as any interview expectations. Regardless of article type or length, all submissions are expected to follow the best practices outline in this style guide and must include:

• A proposed headline
• Subheadings
• Hyperlinked sources

Some additional notes on quizzes:

• These trivia quizzes (not personality quizzes) should be fun, quirky and cool; they should never, ever feel like a boring assessment or an attempt to test what the reader remembers from an article. The answer text especially is a good place to be clever and engaging.
• Each trivia quiz typically has 10 questions and a short intro (25 words) to kick it off. Each quiz also has a set of answer choices (typically three, but we’re flexible) and a sentence or two of text that pops up when the reader answers the question (aka the description).
• All quotes should be in quotation marks, regardless of whether they’re used as standalone questions or answer choices.
• The question part of the quiz always starts with a capital letter and ends with appropriate end punctuation. 
• The answer choices start with a lowercase letter (unless they are proper names) and have no end punctuation — unless they are complete sentences. (As in: the supercomputer vs. The first supercomputers were built by Seymour Cray.) 
• The description always appears, regardless of whether the reader answered correctly, so avoid leading with things like “Yes,” “That’s right,” “Nope,” or “Fooled you,” which could be confusing to readers, depending on whether the answer they chose was right or wrong.
• The description should be worded so that the reader can tell what the right answer was. So, if the choices were “engine,” “carburetor” and “driveshaft,” the description might be, “The engine is where the magic happens and your car starts to turn fuel into motion.” 
• If the question asks which of the following is not true, the word “NOT” should be in all capital letters to prevent reader confusion. Use this sparingly, if ever, as readers tend to be confused even with the all-caps “NOT.”
• Please also provide a list of sources you used to create the quiz. This won’t be published but will help us fact check if there are questions about answer choices or correctness.