Don't be Substandard

There's a lot of crud on the Internet and much of it is your fault. Herein I endeavor to lift you above the teeming masses. Stick with me for insightful insights relevant to publishing on this elite content repository. You might imagine yourself blossoming into a junior Hemingway but without crucial knowledge of HubPages inner-workings you will be a lone voice typing in the wilderness. You will end up substandard. Never will the online world find your unique arrangements of verbs and nouns. Put down that bear claw and follow me on our journey to acceptable HubPages compositions.

Frequent studies indicate human eyeballs want to read words interspersed with photos. An average brain quickly loses focus without bright shiny colors to distract. Indeed, words mean something but pictures take up space. Imagine how successful JK Rowling might have been if she tucked a few high resolution dragon snapshots into her manuscripts.

Look online for free images. Public repositories such as morguefile.com provide plenitudes. Enter virtually any topic into the search box: almost immediately you will find yourself accosted by high quality images guaranteed to sate HubPages 'bots.

Long ago man figured out how to count words and that technology persists to this day. Your online compositions must adhere to well-defined length requirements lest your meaning become too concise. HubPages defines standard writing as consisting of at least 700 words. 699 word compositions fall short. 698 words are simply bogus. The medium is the message because the word count can be counted. Semantics evade computers but ciphering can be automated. Join the collective if you want to survive.

Plan to crank out voluminous volumes of stuff that passes the spell-checker. Whatever you do, don't position yourself as a modern-day Ogden Nash or ee cummings because the HubPages algorithms have no sense of humor. Your work will sink like a stone to unexplored depths of page rankings visited only by computer science students and people with dial-up modems. Break out a thesaurus: nothing else matters.

Your readers want to be asked what they think. After reading your sufficiently long composition they want nothing more than a pop quiz. Always cobble together one or more insightful questions designed to reinforce your writing without becoming obsequious or pedantic. The best questions reflect a deep meaning of your nuance and also add to your word count. I think.

You will learn that almost no one takes your poll but whoop, there it is. HubPages makes you a better writer by obligating you to develop curricula along with your writing. Indeed, Hemingway might still be drinking his breakfast from a gin bottle had he taken the time to append a few SAT questions at the end of Farewell to Arms.

As previously stated, 700 words matter but anything less will be digitally smacked down. To that end I continue perusing the pages of my mind and dumping it onto my keyboard.

Where does a general keep his armies?

In his sleevies.

Obviously you and your human brain found the preceding joke humorous. A standard HubPages article is neither funny nor not-funny: funny can't be measured. Since funny cannot be measured, funny will never ever be a condition for publication. A computer can do some cool stuff but chuckling ain't one of them.

You might think you're funny. Your barbershop quartet might find you hilarious. Unfortunately, your computer can't figure it out. When submitting an article for publication, adhere to the rules as thoughtfully described here without regard to content. There is no such thing as a well-written article: there is only form and layout.

It's been fun writing to you. Enjoy your time on HubPages and don't take it too seriously. We're all doing the best we can. Some of us are innately substandard. We have no hope of becoming the writer our Mom always told us we would be. No amount of touch-typing will elevate us but we won't stop trying.