Publishing Conventions

Transcription

1 Publishing Conventions Monica Johnstone, PhD Dir. of CLAS Communications & Advancement

2 Better Newsletters Have Approved GVSU logo Masthead and Table of Contents Page Numbers and End Signs Appropriate Fonts (Serif or Sans Serif?) Sentence case or Title Case White Space Suppress Widows and Orphans Strong Lead Sentences Consistent Column Locations Great Proofreading

3 Approved GVSU Logos Institutional Marketing has a webpage called Logo Standards and Downloads standards.standards or Have a look at your first newsletter page is it clearly a publication coming from your department and GVSU?

4 Masthead Newsletters should have a section dedicated to providing information such as: Editor s name Contact address and Website URL Instructions for anyone sending material for publication Possibly your mission statement

5 Gives credit to staff Provides contact info & can encourage change-of-address notification Promotes website

6 Table of Contents Better retrieval of information later Allows scanning for items of interest Looks professional

7 Page Numbers If you have a hard copy newsletter, do number the pages and use your footer for information such as the issue number, publication date and publication title. This allows readers to refer to particular information easily and allows easy identification should a page be photocopied

8 End Signs Use a dingbat (little ornamental print element) to signal the end of an article.

9 Appropriate Fonts Serif or Sans Serif? Readability research has shown that in print, people read a bit better with a serif font. And yet, on screen they read better if the font used is sans serif. Times New Roman Baskerville Old Face Bookman Old Style Garamond Arial Verdana Tahoma Century Gothic

10 HOW Many Fonts? Feel free to pick one for Headlines and one for article text (you can even pair serif and sans serif). Even one more font is okay (for pull quotes or footers, for instance). Too many will make your publication look confused and less unified. And avoid SHOUTING in ALL CAPS!

11 Sentence case or Title Case Choose a style for your headlines and be consistent. Sentence case has an initial cap and the rest is lower case (unless a word is a Proper Noun) Title Case Uses an Initial Cap Except on Words Such as the, and, a

12 White Space Dense text on a page is less inviting to read. Edit rather than squeeze. Information surrounded by space gets additional emphasis. For example, a pull quote gets noticed. The space need not be white. The space can be in a block or additional line or column spacing.

13 Suppress Widows & Orphans Widows and orphans are single lines of text in a paragraph that print at the top or bottom of a text box or column. You can choose to avoid separating these lines from the rest of the paragraph. Select the paragraphs in which you want to prevent widows & orphans. On the Format menu, click Paragraph, and then click the Line and Paragraph Breaks tab. Select the Widow/Orphan control check box. (in Publisher)

14 Example

15 Strong story leads The first line or two in an article determines whether we read on. Sally Anderson, 25, is a proud alumna of the X Department. She s now employed in a great position at corporation Y Vs. Four years ago, Sally Anderson left GVSU with a diploma and a dream. She credits her new position as X to the discipline she learned in Prof. Doe s course on Static to be verbs and very just-the-facts Livelier verbs, alliteration and more heart

16 Consistent column locations If your newsletter has an editorial or a chairman s letter or any other regular column, try to keep it in the some position in each issue (that is, if it was on the back page on the right side last time, keep it there).

17 O Pro freading ^ When possible, get someone who did not write or edit the text to proofread. Try looking at each word starting at the end of the article this strips the context away and helps you see. Don t forget to proof the footers, picture captions and Table of Contents.

18 An exercise The world always makes the asumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usaully simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. H. L. Mencken

19 Two requests in my official hat Many alumni graduated from the old divisions and don t realize CLAS exists. Please assist the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences to raise awareness among the alumni by mentioning us. Please include me and Mary Pirkola (News & Information) on your distribution list: johnstmo@gvsu.edu and pirkolam@gvsu.edu