While individual writers’ voices lend character and spice to HowStuffWorks articles, the site has a voice all its own. This voice is:
- Informative: When you finish reading a HowStuffWorks article, you should feel smarter than when you started. You should feel as though the question was answered and/or the concept was fully explained.
- Reassuring: When the material gets difficult, the HowStuffWorks voice carries a sense that it’s easy to understand on a basic level. Imagine explaining the concept at hand to a high schooler: You avoid talking down, pandering and droning on. HowStuffWorks articles share fascinating information without boring readers or making them feel as though they should already know certain bits of information.
- Entertaining: It’s full of liveliness, wit and delight in learning and sharing new information with other people. The voice is humorous and conversational, but not corny. When you read a HowStuffWorks article, it should be obvious that the writer was excited to work on it.
- Clear: Writing is tight, and information appears in a logical order. Sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph, the writing follows a clear train of thought; information appears in the order in which readers are ready to understand it.
- Unbiased: Information is inherently interesting and worth knowing about, and it’s best explained through facts from reputable, verifiable sources (primary sources, whenever possible). You could say this love of information, substantiated facts and correctness is our only bias. Otherwise, articles take a neutral stance toward the subject without offering editorial commentary. They don’t make value judgments, and the author neither reveals their own personal biases nor tries to maintain an artificial balance in the face of overwhelming evidence.
- Thorough: HowStuffWorks gets to the heart of how the subject works. That’s kind of our thing. This approach usually draws heavily from the hard and soft sciences. We provide cultural, historical and scientific context whenever relevant. This level of depth and reliance on the hard and soft sciences is central to the HowStuffWorks brand.
- Original: We have a zero-tolerance policy on plagiarism. Your work must be 100 percent in your own words, with not even a single sentence copied from any of your source material.