Practical Motoring: Readers Write –  Writing Guidelines

Practical Motoring encourages you to write your own articles. You only have to read some of the comments on our articles or on our Facebook page to see that Practical Motoring readers are a knowledgeable bunch that we can all learn from.

Here are some basic guidelines for submitting an article to Practical Motoring’s Readers Write.

As a guide, we suggest writing at least 300-plus words, and rather than just rant about your local car dealer or how one car brand is better or worse than another one, you should develop a considered opinion, observation, theory, commentary, discovery or piece of advice. Or maybe it’s news the world needs to know about. The idea with your article it to develop content that either sparks conversation or educates another car buyer/owner. We’re looking for content that’s useful to Australian motorists, and exactly in what way it’s useful is up to you.

While it can be easy to write when you’ve got a red-hot idea, we recommend not writing more than 850 words and, if you do the article might be edited for length. We’re looking for an article, rather than a forum-style discussion point.

Offensive language or defamatory statements will not be tolerated and, if your article is deemed offensive, slanderous or defamatory the editorial team will not allow it to be published. Similarly, any article that is aggressive, contains gratuitous swearing, is racist, or deliberately inflammatory, or attacks anyone of our writers or contributors, or promotes products or websites will not be published.

Bear in mind that once the article has been submitted you will not be able to edit the article, so, please spell check the article before submitting it, and avoid using abbreviations or CAPS. Because our editorial team will read through and edit you work, it’s possible that the odd mistake may creep into your work. If you spot one, let us know and it will be corrected immediately.

Our suggestion would be to write your article in a word processing application, like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages and then copy and paste it into our text box. That way you will also have a copy of your article, just in case something goes wrong.

And, because only the first sentence of the article will appear on the homepage, it’s important that the first sentence summarises the theme of the article and attracts a reader’s attention without being clickbaity.

Submit your article now