Blogs should be emailed, ideally as a Word file, to Mick Cooper at mick.cooper@roehampton.ac.uk

Pluralistic practice welcomes blog posts from all members of the counselling and psychotherapy community, as well as the wider field. You don’t have to be a ‘signed up’ pluralist or agree with what pluralistic therapists have to say.

Guidelines for writing a blog are as follows:

• The blog should be between about 500 and 1500 words.
• Don’t spend too long thinking about it. Just write what’s on your mind. It doesn’t have to be an essay. Spontaneous, open, and flowing is best.
• You can write about anything you want to that relates to pluralism in therapy (e.g., practice, research, supervision, theory, philosophy, social justice); but make sure, in your blog, it is explicitly related to pluralism: of interest to readers who will want to know more about, and think about, the pluralistic approach. This might be pluralism as a whole, or specific aspects of pluralistic practice such as shared decision-making, integration, metatherapeutic communication/metacommunication, goals, therapy tasks, therapist–client collaboration. General practice issues are, of course, also of interest to pluralistic therapists, but there’s better places to post them if they’re not specific to pluralism, per se.
• If you’ve got an idea but not sure it will be right for the site, it’s fine to email Mick first to check.
• If you haven’t done so already, please ensure you read a few of the blogs that have already been posted to get a sense of the kind of format and content that we’re posting: http://pluralisticpractice.com/blog/.
• Feel free to be as critical as you want about pluralism and what John, Mick, and others have written; but obviously keep it constructive and well-informed.
• The writing should be aimed for a general audience (of mainly counsellors and psychotherapists) rather than a specific academic/journal readership.
• Writing about clients can be great, and really bring the blog to life, but do make sure it’s all fully anonymised/disguised and that you have the necessary permissions.
• Please ensure you include, in the Word file: a title for the blog, your name, and any affiliation/role you want to give (e.g., ‘Counsellor in private practice’, ‘Lecturer in Psychotherapy at XYZ Institute) with hyperlinks.
• We generally follow APA formatting standards for the blog posts, though any specific formatting guidance here takes precedence. Note:
  • Single spacing after full stops
  • Single quotation marks rather than double
  • UK spelling
• Please don’t put academic references in the text. Rather, give hyperlinks for specific words or sentences to relevant web addresses (which could be the online version of the journal paper, a book site, or other online resources). If you don’t know how to do hyperlinks, just add in the web address in square brackets or a comment and that can be done at Mick’s end.
• They’ll be some minor editing and tidying up at Mick’s end, and perhaps a few comments or request for further clarification (but we’ll try and keep that to a minimum). Then it will be sent back to you so that you can complete a final draft. You have the final say on what you want to write (but we do keep the final say on whether or not it goes up).
• It’s great if you have an image that you want to go with the blog, so do send that along if you have one or find one (or make it clear if you don’t mind us finding one for you). But please make sure you have permission. To find an image you can go to Google Images and, under ‘Tools’, set Usage rights to ‘Labelled for reuse’. Go the site where the image is at and then send Mick the hyperlink, so that he can check it out.
• Once the blog is published, do try and help to distribute it via social media or other networks.
• Please do, also, leave comments on other blog posts. Help us create a lively community that discusses ideas and practices in a friendly and open-minded way.

Our blogs are, of course, the personal opinions of our authors and no liability will attach to the website as a result of the views presented.

If you want to do something different from any of the guidance here, please email Mick first to discuss. Otherwise, blog posts should follow these guidelines as specified.