Guidelines for Writers

Staff Writers:

To help in the learning curve of the newer writers I am writing this little guide.

1) In the subject line of your weekly email please write the date or volume/issue and the title of the column, for example “Muslimah August 21 2007” or better yet “Muslimah for Volume 9 Issue 35” so there is no chance for confusion at my end.

2) Please don’t add corrections after your original email. You can send the entire thing again afterwards if you want, with your own corrections, subject line “Muslimah August 21 2007 CORRECTED” as long as you do it all before 5pm–(some writers send many emails a week and you should understand that unless what you are emailing is really worthwhile it is counterproductive for all concerned if you send me lots of emails–more chance of a mistake.) If I put your original article in before i get the corrected version, I do not promise to go back and redo my work of formatting your article. If you really care about the quality of your article then take the time to read it an extra time before sending it to me the first time!

3) Please send your article as an MS Word attachment to your email. That is the easiest way for me to save your article into the correct place.

4) Please, take the time to proofread your articles. I have limited time to work with your articles (24 hours from your deadline til we go to print, of which only 8 hours is work–and that eight hours will be completely filled by doing the layout of the paper) and I appreciate your taking the time to clean the articles somewhat. They don’t have to be perfect–I and my own articles are far from perfect. But don’t make your articles ridiculously bad and then just expect me to clean them up. If you’re doing the best you can that’s fine with me–I understand that for some of the writers English is not their first language and I am not offended if they have some mistakes–but I am offended when a writer who has a graduate school background makes many childish mistakes.

Deadline is Tuesday at 5pm.

Word count should be between 800 and 1200 for most sections of the paper.

Each week is a clean slate for me and as you may know I am taking in articles from ten different writers–each Monday my universe boils down to the emails I have received since the previous issue of the paper–so don’t be surprised if I don’t know that you expect me to look back for an email from three weeks ago Thursday!

Please try to send me original pictures in an attachment to your email.

Thanks,

Adil