About us: A small team at University Fellowship Church started ufcwomen.blog in 2019 to continue the dialogue about biblical truths brought to the table during our weekly Bible study. Weekly posts turned into daily posts in the spring of 2020 as COVID-19 forced us to change the way we were doing ministry. Teaching and encouragement naturally flowed from the blog as dozens of women got involved in writing posts, sharing pictures, and reading Scripture. In late 2022, we took a short sabbatical from posting to evaluate how to serve our women best as we continue to emerge from the pandemic. Now, as we begin 2023, we are back to posting once or twice a week with hopes of encouraging spiritual growth and community among our women. We are planning a full year of written and audio features by writers and teachers at UFC to encourage and challenge women as they journey with Jesus through different seasons of their lives.
If you are interested in joining the writing rotation or offering a one-time post, please reach out to Editor Jaime Sherman via ufcwomen.blog@gmail.com. While the readership of ufcwomen.blog now spans the globe, our editorial team holds fast to the mission to provide articles and resources specifically designed for the women of UFC to encourage them to move through their days rooted in God’s Word. The blog offers an excellent place for writers, photographers, artists, and others to use their God-given gifts to bless their sisters at UFC. We have a few guidelines we ask our contributors to follow.
Copyright: Only original articles, voice recordings, photographs, and other artwork will be accepted for publication. This said, as your work is done on a voluntary basis for ufcwomen.blog, you retain the rights to your work. We do ask that you wait 30 days before submitting elsewhere.
Bios: We will highlight guest contributors with a short bio and photo at the end of each published work. This helps a big church feel smaller. If you are a regular contributor, you only need to submit the 2-3 sentence bio and headshot once each calendar year.
Deadlines: The submission deadline for all blog material is no less than one week before publication unless otherwise arranged with the assigning editor.
WRITING GUIDELINES
- Content: All articles must align with UFC’s statement of faith and fit with the mission of ufcwomen.blog to encourage the women of UFC to move through their days rooted in God’s Word.
- Length: Each submission may be no more than 1,000 words, including the use of Scripture quotations.
- File sharing: We use Google docs to share, edit, comment, and approve changes.Your document link should be sent to jaimesherman@msn.com. Feel free to follow up your submission with a text to 541.968.9529 to make sure Jaime gets the file.
- External links: We rarely accept the use of links to other internet sites, but we welcome discussion on whether including a specific link or links is appropriate within a given post. For Scripture readings within the context of Bible study, we are comfortable linking readers to the printable version of verses at biblegateway.com.
- Attribution: We discourage you from quoting extensively from sources; however, brief quotes can be appropriate in the context of a reflection or teaching piece. If you quote from a source, please provide attribution within the text, not as a footnote. See style guide for more on this.
- We typically use the ESV for Bible references, though we welcome the use of other translations so long as the version is noted with the appropriate abbreviation. When quoting from a Bible translation, please retain the version’s style even if it conflicts with the general ufcwomen.blog style.
- Editing: We encourage you to bookmark our style guide for review during the writing process.
- Typically at least two editors review each post before publication — one to approve content and one for copyediting, layout, and readability. If a substantial edit has take place, we will give you the opportunity to approve changes to content and wording before the post is sent to layout. Post-publication changes are only allowed for fact errors or at the discretion of the editors, so please make sure you are comfortable with your content and wording before submitting it to us.
- Our heart behind editing is to make you, the writer, sound even better. We know the editing process can be uncomfortable, and our hope is that you never take the questions we pose about your submission or the changes we make to your work as a personal attack. If you ever have any questions about how we choose to edit your post, please reach out to us. We’re not perfect, and we fully own that sometimes we make mistakes. The editing process is meant to be a collaboration for the encouragement of our UFC women to the glory of God, and we do this best as a team!
RECORDING GUIDELINES
These guidelines apply to Scripture readings or any other recorded speech done at home on a phone or home recording device.
- When recording, always leave a little bit of space at the beginning and end of your recording.
- When using a phone to record, make sure the phone does not move when recording. Even the slightest movement of the recording device can cause large disturbances in the resulting recording.
- Try to locate the microphone on your recording device (iPhone mics are on the bottom) and make sure you are 6-10 inches away from the microphone.
- Try not to breathe out air directly into the microphone while speaking.
- If you make a mistake while recording, you do not have to stop and restart, you can pick up from the most recent starting point, leave some space, and continue from there. Those kinds of things are easy to edit!
- Try listening to your recording. We know this isn’t fun, but see if there is any excess noise in the background. If there is, perhaps try another room.
- If possible, record in a room with carpet. The less resonance there is the more detailed the recording will be.
- Uploading Guidelines:
- Typically audio files can be submitted as an email attachment sent to jaimesherman@msn.om or via text to 541.968.9529.
- Sometimes, when a file is too big to email, it is helpful to record your part in a few smaller sections and send those individually.
- Please appropriately label your recording. (i.e. Jaime Sherman_John 3:1-18_Part2)
- Try to avoid compressing audio files. Often a warning will come up when this is happening. If this happens, maybe find another way to send in your audio file.
- If you have any questions about where or how to upload your recording, please contact whoever assigned you the recording part.
VISUAL ART GUIDELINES
- Writers are welcome to propose and to submit artwork for their posts, but the editors retain the final decision on all artwork. Please provide the source of all images because we must guarantee we have the rights to use each image. Please refrain from searching for generic photographs on Internet search engines because the Internet is a murky place as it concerns copyright. We have a source from which to pull stock photos.
- High-resolution images should be sent to jaimesherman@msn.com or ufcwomen.blog@gmail.com as either .jpg or .png.
- For any submitted photographs that depict someone other than yourself or someone in your immediate family, please forwarded written permission (either physical or electronic) to ufcwomen.blog@gmail.com.