During my first month on Steemit (and now because of my activity as a curator for OCD), I noticed that #science is filled with posts that can be sorted into three categories:
- Plagiarized
- Badly Written
- Good
Sadly, category 3 is very rare and plagiarized posts dominate the tag. But how do you write a good post? What is important?
- One or more picture(s) (with a source, if you didn’t take it yourself)
- Not too much text (under 1000 words seems to be appropriate)
- Not too little text (200 words at least)
- No videos (or at least not as main content)
- Original content
- Good grammar and spelling (You can try the free version of Grammarly to find basic mistakes)
- Sources and/or References
Readers want to be entertained. For that, you need to present new information (or old information in a new way). You need to keep the reader’s attention throughout the whole post or they will just close it without upvoting because they get bored.
So don’t just copy or rephrase an article from somewhere. Give the reader something new, something unique. An exciting point of view. What would you want to read?
At the same time, it is important to provide credible sources. You can make claims all you want; the quality of your post heavily depends on the quality of your sources. Did you just make the information up? Or is there actually a study about this? Don’t expect your reader to look up everything by themselves.
If you want to use content created by someone else, make it clear that it isn’t your own content and add content you created yourself. Nobody wants to give you upvotes (money) for something you just found on the internet!
It is not easy to write good posts, but following these guidelines will already make you stand out from the trash that currently dominates #science!
Got a scientific topic which you want to see as a story? Leave me a comment!
You’re working in a STEM related field? Participate in my science challenge!
Check out 
Picture taken from pixabay.com