[Dargon-writers-list] Style guide

[William Donahue]

All,

I need your help. We are starting to get lax about using the style 
guide, and that is not a good thing. I've found some problems with that, 
not just in the stories I'm preparing for publication in DZ 21-3, but in 
many stories that have been on the list.

If you don't follow the style guide your story will, at best, not look 
consistent with the other stories in the zine, or, at worst, it will be 
unreadable. That is, unless I go in and fix it manually, as I've been doing.

One of the recent problems is special characters like smart quotes and 
smart ellipses. Turn 'em off, run your story through a text editor to 
get rid of them, or find them and fix them yourself, please.

Another example is the story header. It's laid out very clearly in the 
style guide how to do this. If you don't know it, please don't wing it 
or use someone else's draft as an example. Go look it up.

These are just examples. Please review the whole guide 
(http://www.dargonzine.org/doclib/styleguide.shtml or Writers Menu, 
Document Library, Dargonzine Policies, Style Guide). We're far from 
unique in having a style guide, and probably much more forgiving than 
other publications when it's violated. But it's getting to the point 
that it is adding substantial work to me in the already substantial work 
I do to produce the zine. So, I'm asking you to help fix this.

Thanks

Liam