This is how you should format the header at the top of the document:
Hed: Put the title of your article here — make it interesting
Byline: Your name, EAA XXXXXX, chapter affiliation, and role if any
For the body of your article, ideally, you’d have around 1,000 words or less but just a couple of paragraphs is also fine. If you wind up having lots to say, you should consider breaking the article into two or more in a series, which we love to receive.
For pictures, (our readers love them), rather than embedding them in the document, we use the following statement in the document itself so our colleagues in Oshkosh know which picture to put where, allowing them flexibility when converting stuff to be usable online, on a phone, or computer. Note the “art” statement should be in blue just to make it stand out to the copy editors. The filename is intended to be a meaningful description of the image. Ideally, you’d have already renamed the image files accordingly.
Art: BNP MMYY Image Name.jpg Caption: Your caption
You can cut and paste the “art” statement multiple times if you like, and then edit each line for multiple pictures, like this.
Art: BNP MMYY Image Name 2.jpg Caption: Your 2nd caption
Art: BNP MMYY Image Name 3.jpg Caption: Your 3rd caption
A few tips on images that might be useful:
- Photos should be neither too low nor too high resolution.
- Don’t use low resolution images from a phone, choose “actual size” if you are prompted with that option. Anything between about 2- and 5-megabyte file sizes are ideal for pictures to show well on a computer or phone.
- Photos taken in landscape format rather than horizontal are much better for display on computer screens.
- It’s best to send multiple images in one email, but if the email size becomes too big to send, split them into smaller groups.
Bits and Pieces sends on the first Tuesday of every month, and all content is due to our colleagues in Oshkosh two Mondays prior. If you plan to send an article to me, please allow me a week before the submission date to edit and collate all the content for submission. That means, please send your articles to me on a weekend nearest the 8th of the prior month. Hint: I just had a very busy Sunday night/Monday morning!
Don’t worry about word count too much. Your personal style and content are what matters.
The purpose of this article is to help reduce the workload to create an article for Bits and Pieces, and help you focus on being creative. Don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have at newsletter.EAACC@gmail.com.
As always, I’d like to thank our contributors this month, and I would like you all to consider joining them!
