The following are collected tips to help make your content better. This isn't designed to be a definite stylesheet, but our editors will correct content to conform to CP style, which this uses. This is modified from the style guide I use at Treating Yourself; please feel free to use elsewhere. As well, don't feel overly restricted by this; one of the joys of writing for Hotbox is how utterly experimental you're allowed to be with your writing.

As always, please direct any questions to your helpful editors, who also are willing to workshop and go over your copy with you.

Hotbox Magazine Writer's Guide

—Pick a genre of writing and stay with it. Don't turn a news piece into an opinions piece. Don't turn an opinions piece into a review. Don't turn a review into a news piece.

—Pick one tense and stick with it. Generally, use the third-person plural. It's easy to write in first-person singular (IE, "I," "my," etc.) but it reads a lot like a journal. When writing for print production, typically write as if you're addressing a big auditorium full of people.

—Second-person tenses are fine for reviews, ie, "Next, you dump the ice into the Bubbleator," but stick with either that or the imperative, ie, "Next, dump the ice into the Bubbleator," (the latter of which is probably preferable). Try to avoid first-person plural ("we") as it's patronizing. Don't switch mid-article!

—On the patronizing note, never start a sentence with "Let's". It is supremely patronizing, kinda like how you talk to kindergartners. Our readers are smarter than that, don't treat them any less!

—To quote Strongbad:

"OHHHH! If you want to be possessive, it's just I-T-S, but if you want to use a contraction, then it's I-T-APOSTROPHE-S ...Scallywag!"

—Ellipses (...) are three periods and only three periods. Overusing them makes a piece seem really loose. Use them if somebody's voice trails, don't use them if somebody is interrupted. Use an emdash instead, for instance,

—On quotation, always create a new paragraph after quotations and format them as follows:

Notice the positioning of the quotation marks, the comma after "awesome" (instead of a period, though exclamation and question marks are unchanged), the period after the subject. This is called the "weave" in news writing.

—Similarly, for the first instance of the person's name, put their full title ahead of their name. Use their last name when referring to them afterwards, unless they are a medical doctor, in which case, put "Dr." before the last name.

—Don't use quotation marks for emphasis. Ever "knew" somebody who uses "air quotes" for nearly "everything," even when it totally doesn't "need" them? That's how it comes off. Instead, use italics for emphasis.

—Also, CAPITAL LETTERS PROVIDE VOLUME ON THE INTERNET, but not in print. Instead,use bold for volume.

—Avoid passive voice. Instead of "The copy was edited by Ændrew," use instead "Ændrew edited the copy." The increases the prominence of the sentence's subject, it makes it less wordy and it makes it read much easier. This is one of those things that takes awhile to get. If you're interested in locating passive voice in your copy, feel free to ask me and I can point it out. —Format dates as per Canadian Press style. For instance:

—For citing Hotbox or other online content, use a hyperlink. This will be converted to MLA for print publication.

—For the first instance of the name "Hotbox Magazine" in an article, spell it out in full. After that, shorten it to "Hotbox".

—Generally use APA (American Psychiatric Association) for medical and more scientific articles and MLA, APA or Chicago for sociological or political ones.

—Don't use the Oxford comma, it slows down flow. This is the last comma before the "and" or the "or" in a list. For example:

—Percent symbols (%) look really ugly in print. Generally change them to "per cent" in the text (As per CP style), though feel free to keep them in graphs or lists of information where there's a lot of them.

—There is one—and only one—space after periods. The habit of putting two spaces after a period is fine if you're using a typewriter, but digital keyboards don't jam (Unless you're eating a sandwich near your computer, which I don't recommend). It's not a big thing if you forget; I just run one quick find and replace, but some people are really picky about this if you publish elsewhere.

—Don't indent the first line of every paragraph, or worry about margins and the like. The layout program applies its own values anyway, so anything you do will be overridden by Ivanart anyway. —You can use emdashes sparingly—like this, to do short parenthetical sentences—but don't put spaces before or after the emdashes. I say sparingly because they temporarily break flow in an abrupt fashion and too many makes pieces read as really fragment-y.

—If you use a colon ( : ) in a sentence, use it before a list, not as a way to do parenthetical sentences. For instance:

—For numbers, spell the numbers one to ten in full, and use numericals for 11 and onwards. (IE: "eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15..." and onwards)

—When writing a news piece from an identifiable location, put it in italicized ALLCAPS before the lede.

For those used to writing blogs, journals, and other first person-style works, the below gives some key differences when trying to write for high-level print:

—It's pretty obvious, but don't use Internet tonality conventions. By this, I mean things like smilies, acronyms like "LOL," lots of ellipses and other grammatical constructs used on the Internet to poetically convey emotion. These are never used in print production and break style significantly. Part of the skill of writing for print is being able to convey tone and emotion without these constructs, though usually it can be achieved merely be leaving them out and then adding more italics for emphasis.

—CAPSLOCK IS NOT CRUISE-CONTROL FOR COOL. Never use ALLCAPS for anything, not even section headers (Exception: City names before ledes). If an ALLCAPS style is going to be applied, it can be added in two clicks by the layout editor (While it takes quite a bit more effort to decapitalize whole sentences in upper-case). Use bold and italics for emphasis, and use bold for section headers.

—All formatting short of bold and italics is generally lost when transferred to a layout program (InDesign, in this case). Don't try to make it look like anything but plain text with a little bit formatting, as it will be lost and just increases editing time.

—Vitriol doesn't transfer well from the Internet. Try to keep all emotion on an even-keel.

More will be added to this list eventually. It's designed to be a large, monolithic document that can be easily referenced. Please feel free to add suggestions in the Comments section!

       

Written by :

Ændrew Rininsland