The U4 Blog is a space for practitioners, policymakers, activists, and academics to share insights, lessons, and thinking on how to build a sustainable and inclusive future by curbing corruption.

See also:

• U4 style guide for instructions about readability, language, grammar, and spelling. We use British spelling.
• U4 photo policy
• U4 Authors' guide to working with copy-editors

Before you write

• To keep it short and clear:
  Decide on a narrow, anti-corruption related topic, experience, or set of reflections that you wish to share with an interested audience.
• To make it attractive:
  Imagine some typical people among U4’s primary audience: practitioners and policymakers. How can your blog post be made particularly relevant to them?
• To make sense:
  Make a brief outline of your blog post – the U4 director or a coordinating U4 adviser can confirm if the angle will be useful for our readers.
• To make reading easy:
  Look at U4’s style guide and try to apply it in your writing.

Short and clear

• Less detail makes it easier to remember.
• Aim for 800 – 1,000 words.
• Don't write 'in this post I will…', or 'this post aims to…,' – just jump straight into your discussion.
• Use short paragraphs of four or five sentences with mostly active verbs.
• Emphasise your points with subheadings. A reader should be able to understand the broad direction of your argument, just by quickly scanning the subheadings.
• Experts enjoy easy reads, too: Use a natural style that avoids jargon, acronyms and difficult words where simpler synonyms exits.
• Your readers should understand your arguments or ideas without needing to look up supporting resources.

Conversational tone

• The blog is a personal point of view, so it should be written in your own style or ‘voice’, and in an engaging, conversational way.
• It can be helpful to think of your blog as a conversation with a friend from outside the sector: someone who is interested, but not an expert.

Attractive

• Lead with the best. think like a journalist and present your main message first. Move on to background, context, and explanation later in the blog.
• Stories stick better than facts. Try to use illustrative real life or imaginary examples.
• Write a standfirst that will sit below your title (see examples in the U4 blog). The standfirst is a short text of only 170–200 characters – not words ­– with spaces. It quickly presents something from your post that should convince readers to keep reading.

Referencing

Show where your evidence is from with links rather than citations.

Visuals

• Images, charts, figures, and infographics are welcome as long as readers can interpret them quickly.
• Depending on the graphic or image, we may be able to recreate it (and perhaps adapt the content) in U4 style and colours. Please let us know in advance if you think this will be helpful.
• Give it a title that contains the message. For example:
  • Figure 2: A higher percentage of female judges are appointed through the magistrates school compared to men.
• Accessibility is as important for visuals as for text. Eg tables can be machine-read for people with visual impairment. Text that is locked in an image cannot be machine-read.
  
  If you have a text-heavy image that is not already well explained in your main text. Supply a descriptive text that helps someone who cannot see the visual understand your message.
• Please share any suitable photos for the blog and we’ll check that it fits our needs and U4 photo policy. We also need the:
  • Photographer’s name
  • Image licence (copyright/CC/public domain)
  • Caption. Eg named people, places, and situations, or a message from the post.

About the author

• You get full attribution. Please send us a short biographical paragraph with your professional role/position, affiliation, and any other relevant information.
• Include contact details or social media handles if you wish.

U4 editing and publishing process

1. Review of draft 1 and seeking internal approval for publishing.
2. Possible request for adaptations from the author.
3. Approval for publishing by U4 Director.
4. Professional copyeditor checks U4 style and may suggest ways to optimise readability.
5. Author reviews suggested edits and returns it to the copyeditor.
6. Copyeditor finalises version for publishing.
7. Publishing process: layout, visuals, keywords, final control by U4 comms team and copyeditor. We normally either involve the author or the coordinating U4 advisers for final control.

Share widely

We encourage reuse, printing and sharing of U4 blog posts for non-commercial purposes – applying a Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 .

The U4 communications team share the post in official U4 social media channels. We happily coordinate promotion with you as the author/your organisation.