Photo guidelines for Dialogue (and a few tricks) 

Writers’ guidelines and general writing tricks
Dialogue 

• All submissions to Dialogue must be unique to Dialogue. That is, they have to be written for this newspaper and not for anyone else. After a story has appeared in Dialogue, it’s okay to use it elsewhere. We would appreciate a credit line that says: “This story originally appeared in Dialogue”.
• Stories or columns should be no longer than 400 words. Once you know that, it’s easier to plan the story before you begin to write it. You’ll probably find that planning makes you pay attention to what’s really important, and helps keep your words simple. Hopefully it will also encourage you to keep sentences short. A trick: don’t let yourself use any adverbs, and keep the adjectives to a minimum. Another trick: Tell yourself you will not use the words “as”, “since”, “while”, “because” or any other “joiner words”. You’ll find, once you pay attention to those nasty, sloppy little words, that they tend to make sentences ramble, get tangled, and become ambiguous.
• We welcome columns/opinion pieces, but not necessarily on a regular basis. We try to use them when we can, but that’s as far as we can go. We give priority to our “regulars” who have been writing for years, and our readers expect them – Diana Duncan-Fletcher, Sandy Cotton (The Deacon’s Bench), Lisa Russell (Archives) and Win Perryman (Amnesty International) for instance. It’s best not to hope that anything will appear monthly without fail, and nothing in the text should indicate that. We can’t make promises either to our writers or our readers. This is standard procedure for most professional publications.
• Stories must have a focus and an approach – just one, no more. So, for instance, if you’re writing about an event, it should only be about that – without any opinion at all. A story about an event must be treated as a story, and never as an advertisement.
• If you’re writing an opinion/column, it must focus on your thoughts and conclusions and nothing more. It should only be an opinion. It should not also be about an event or a person. The event or person can be mentioned, of course – but only “in passing”. An opinion piece shouldn’t be ABOUT the event or person. Stories that include news about events, or profiles of people, fall into a different category – news stories and features.
• Generally speaking, if you are writing about an event, you should use the third person and not bring yourself into it at all, even though you were there. (This “rule” sometimes gets broken with reports from the ACW and so on. In fact, There are always exceptions to the “rules”, but they are left to the discretion of the editor to sort out depending on context, approach, and style.)
• If you are writing an opinion piece or personal essay, that’s when you should be using the first person.
• Any story must be accurate. This means no “guesses” about what someone felt or saw or experienced. If you are writing about a person, the person must tell you directly what he or she felt, saw, or experienced, and you can quote him or her. But don’t make the mistake of telling readers, for instance, that so-and-so dreams of going to the moon or losing 20 pounds or whatever – unless the person tells you that face to face and you can write it down word for word. Then you can quote those words exactly if it suits the story.
• Check your verb tenses. This sounds like an obvious thing, but those pesky tenses can creep up and take over unless you’re on top of them. If you’re using past-tense verbs, stick to them. If you’re using present-tense verbs, stick to them. In general, you’ll find it’s much trickier to write in the present tense, and usually not a good idea for that reason (except, of course, when present tense verbs appear in direct quotes – for example: “I’m not very good at fly fishing,” Mr. Jones said, “even though I am always learning what I can from my neighbours.”)
• Keep your thoughts clear and organized. Trick: Before you start to write anything, jot down the things you most want to say. Create a kind of “grocery list” of ideas or statements in order of priority. Make yourself write each item in your list in fewer than 12 words. It’s a challenge, but your brain will soon show you what’s critical and what isn’t.
• Stories or columns/opinions must be for the benefit of the readers only, and never overtly for the writer or anything the writer is involved in. They must be as objective as possible, and not tied to any particular “agenda”. We won’t use them if it’s obvious they are promotional material for any person, group, committee or whatever.
• All stories and columns will be edited by the editor. All will be proofread by a professional “outside” proofreader. We are sticklers on “clean” copy.
• If something needs to be edited in a major way or rewritten, we try to run it by the writer first. Sometimes this isn’t possible due to time. However, all our writers are told from the start that stories have to be within our required word count. If they go over that (and they sometimes do), the stories will be edited for length if we run out of space. Sometimes we’re lucky and longer stories will fit. But there are no guarantees, so it’s better to write it short first rather than have the editor cut it later.
• Once in awhile a significant feature story will be longer. This happens at our discretion, depending on the story itself and its relevance or readability.
• Stories must not be formatted. We need to receive them in a simple Word document, preferably in Times Roman, single-spaced, with no special treatment – no headlines, no indentation (other than at the beginning of paragraphs, if you wish) no bold-face, no justification, no footnotes – no formatting at all.
• Try to write the way you speak – the way you might tell someone at your kitchen table, over a cup of tea. We really want to hear your own voice. Editing will happen, but always with great respect to the voice of the writer.