Notes to Doll Reader & Teddy Bear and Friends' Authors
Formatting
Please avoid formatting your manuscripts. Everything should be flush left, single spaced (indicate new paragraphs with a five-space tab in the new first line), no boldface or italic type. Underline words for emphasis in quotes where the speaker stressed a particular word or when you think you really need to get the reader's attention.
Hyphens
Connect compound modifiers with a hyphen, e.g. “high-quality work” not “high quality work,” which suggests good work gone bad. Hyphens aren’t needed between an adverb and an adjective (e.g., highly qualified personnel) and they shouldn’t be inserted within the title of a work (e.g., “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial”)
Numbers
Please no superscript "nd" or "th" in ordinals (e.g., 5th rather than 5th); if your computer is set to replace th with th, just backspace and re-type th; it should accept it then. Or, in Word anyway, go to the top bar, click “Tools,” then “AutoCorrect Options.” Find the autochange for Xth and delete it.
Real numbers should be written with a hyphen between the integer and fraction: e.g. “2-1/2 men.” Write out the integers 0-9, i.e., “That was one angry contributor.”
Use numerals for larger numbers. Always write out “percent,” please don’t use the % symbol.
Quotation marks
Include primary quotes inside double quotation marks—including the comma pause before attribution (e.g., “This is dumb,” he says.). Use single quotes for secondary quotes inside a larger quoted sentence: “He said, ‘this is dumb,’ but that’s the AP style,” I told him.
TBF style note: Use a single close-quote as a symbol for feet and a double close-quote for inches—except inside quotations (e.g.: The bear stands 1’ 6” tall.; “My ego is about one-and-a-half feet tall,” he said.)
Spaces
Single space between sentences. Separate items in a list by a comma, including the last item, e.g., “red, white, and blue” and not “red, white and blue.”
Style
Please try to avoid the passive voice in your writing. We want to sound as if we’re talking to our friends and peers. “Repairs were made to the bear’s eyes” sounds a lot less friendly than “I repaired the bear’s eyes.”
There’s rarely any reason to use anything other than “says” when recounting an interview in a column or feature story. Please use “Smith says” or “says Smith”—and always in the present tense. Let’s keep “Smith exclaims” etc, for when we really need them.
It’s easy to write sentences with more than 25 words, but it’s often hard to make sense of them. If you’ve written a whopper of a sentence, please see if you can cut it into two or three more-easily digested pieces. And it’s no sin to start a sentence with “And” or “Also” if need be.
Always include doll/bear heights in inches and centimeters. Include the latter in parentheses. (e.g., The bear is 6 inches (15 cm) tall.)
What to include with your manuscript
High-resolution, jpeg or TIFF photographs—we print at 300 dots-per-inch, much higher resolution than a website or conventional TV. A rule of thumb is to think about how big you want a photo to appear in the magazine. At 300 dpi, an 8” x 10” cover-worthy photo should have 8 x 300 x 10 x 300 or 7,200,000 dots or 7.2 megapixels. For inside photos, we don’t need files that large obviously, but we still want the largest files you can give us. Any file below 500,000 (“500k”) gives us little leeway in sizing the printed photo and how it’s laid out.
Take a stab at writing headlines, deckheads, subheads, and of course captions for the art you send in. They may not make it into the printed article, but they will help the editor understand what you think is important to the story.
Please always include a byline with your name exactly as you want it to appear in print. Optionally, please include a biographical line or two about yourself and, if you’d like, an e-mail or mailing address so that readers can contact you.
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