Screenshots shine when text can’t explain what’s going on, or when a text-based explanation would be too complicated to read. If you’re comparing five different performance testing tools for an article, screenshots would help the reader to distinguish different sections.

It doesn’t always make sense to have a screenshot or code samples in an article. This is typically the case for guides or persuasive writing pieces. However, an article without any images or illustrations can sometimes become tedious to read. If that’s the case, we’ll ask for a stock image to be included to hook the reader from the beginning.

Writing about some topics can get complicated—fast. This complexity can quickly become too much for the reader, so rough architecture diagrams are extremely useful.

We sometimes ask our writers for code samples. This is common for tutorials where the writer provides step-by-step instructions. In this case, explaining a concept isn’t usually sufficient—we want concrete examples of how something should be written so the reader can replicate it.

In cases where there is substantial code included in an article, we will ask our writers to create a well-organized public Github repository to house the project files involved.