1. Write in your own, comfortable voice, as though you were sending a friend an e-mail about a cool technology you came across or a new idea you’re excited about. Don’t try for some sort of dress-occasion voice.

I will copy-edit your posts to make sure they conform to basic Chronicle style, and we’ll do our best to make your piece sound good. But really we’re interested in your ideas and insights, so the more clearly and simply you state them, the less editing we’ll have to do—and the more readers your piece will attract. (Many of us here often refer to Will Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style for inspiration (http://www.bartleby.com/141/).

Writing in the first person is great. And if you can cite concrete examples to back up a point, all the better. If you’re at college with a hyper-active public relations office, that office may be eager to revise your submissions before you send them in. Whether you let them is up to you, but in most cases I’d recommend against it, unless you really, really trust those folks. Our experience is that the more people you let mess with your ideas, the blurrier they’ll look.

As for topics, we’re interested in pretty much anything that has to do with campus technology — and about how campus technologists are influencing broader tech and social trends.You might want to look at what other guest bloggers have written about recently so you don’t cover exactly the same ground. A blog post probably works best if it sticks to one central idea and is only a few paragraphs long—five or six or so. But we’re flexible.

2. Each guest blogger is invited to post for a month. We ask for two posts a week, but if you want to write more often (without overwhelming us), you’re welcome to. You’re also welcome to respond to any comments readers post to your pieces, but that’s not mandatory. And after your month’s up, you’re welcome to send occasional posts, thoughts, images, ideas, suggestions—whatever.

The earlier you can send in your posts, the less frantic any editing we do will be.

3. Please avoid anything that could be construed as unnecessary self-promotion (which would get us in trouble with our editors) or as promoting a company or institution that you work for, or promoting an institution with which you do business. That’s not to say you can’t ever mention a project you worked on that went well, or a college you’ve worked with that’s done something notable—just try not to sound like you’re going out of your way to give anyone a pat on the back. (This is a fine line, obviously. It’s in the same category with Justice Potter Stewart’s observation about pornography—it’s hard to define, but we know it when we see it.)

4. We’d love to have a picture of you to include in your posts. We’d also love to put up any illustrations that help make your points—photos, sketches, plans, whatever. We’re pretty careful about copyright, though, so if you’re sending an illustration, please let us know where it came from, and be certain it’s something we have permission to use. Photos you’ve taken yourself are no problem, obviously, but we can’t use a professional photo from another Web site without permission and probably paying a fee (which we don’t have a budget for). But it’s okay to pull a picture from the PR area of a college’s site, as long as you let us know where it came from and whom to credit.

Also, the constraints of our blog format mean that images won’t appear any wider than the page’s center column (300 pixels, if you’re counting). So keep in mind that any illustrations have to read reasonably well at that size. We can take care of resizing on our end.

Let us know if you have any questions. And thanks for volunteering!