Literary purists among us may find this manual appalling. They may be offended at my breezy approach to grammar, style and punctuation. (I hope the spelling is okay.) My intention is to help bulletin editors with what is written, not how it is written.

So if this manual is a bit slangy; a bit irreverent of pure grammatical form; sometimes over- (or under-) punctuated, let it be. The intent is to be cheerfully informative, not ponderously correct.

Layout and Reproduction judges may not care much for the page layouts in here, especially those bottom margins of varying size. There are several reasons for them. One reason is to provide space for written notes. The other reasons are the editor’s private business.

Editors, do not take this manual for a role model. Just open the pages, stick in your thumb, pull out a plum and say, “Hey, I can use that!”

Without belaboring the point, it’s clearly time for a new model of the Bulletin Editors Manual. Although the age of computers has most certainly arrived, this issue recognizes that many editors and editors-to-be still have the old Smith-Corona, Royal or Underwood manual typewriter on the desk, and have no desire to change. Hence, it still addresses the time- honored methods they might use to assemble a bulletin for print.

Tools and techniques for editors with a computer on their desk will be discussed, but not in detail. Present-day software for word processing and desk top publishing is too diverse—it changes almost daily—to be covered in a manual like this.

All editors and editors-to-be, however, may benefit from discussions herein of production techniques. They come from the accumulated knowledge of some of the Society’s finest editors.

Typography

How to write clearly

How to write with style

How to spell

How to punctuate

Bulletin Contests

Bibliography

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