Please Read

[Ed]

Hi Writers,

Please note that it becomes increasingly important for you to proofread your work - both the document you are submitting as well as the information on the submission form – and to read/follow the guidelines carefully. There has been a tremendous surge in new authors, which means the number of articles submitted has increased.

If your article has been rejected, take a day or two to consider both the rejection and your article, then proofread. If you are unsure about how to use a punctuation mark or how to capitalize the name of a social networking site (or anything else), Google it, just like you would information for your next article. You can also ask in the forums and I will direct you to a reliable source that will help explain. Do not resubmit the same article with errors in tact. This may result in account suspension.

[Ed]

Cont'd

Formatting guidelines MUST be observed. To be blunt, if you cannot take the time to change your font to 12pt Times New Roman and follow our other formatting guidelines, then I simply cannot take the time to read your article. After all, if I go blind, your articles will not be reviewed any faster.

In addition, the long summary/content details MUST have spaces between paragraphs. If these are not in place upon review, your article will be rejected. Customers should not have to look at one chunk of text that appears to have no paragraph structure. While some word processing programs automatically put spaces between paragraphs, the long summary form will not recognize these spaces if you have not manually pressed the “enter” key. It is the writer's responsibility to make sure these spaces appear.

Proofread your titles and short summaries before submission. Articles will be rejected if errors occur here, just as they would if the errors were in your article. No one is going to make changes for you.

If you haven't visited our guidelines in awhile, please do so now.
http://www.constant-content.com/about/w ... elines.htm
These guidelines are not optional, and all must be observed if you wish your article to be accepted.

In addition, please review our licensing structure. This information is illustrated in graphical form in the writers' tutorial:
http://www.constant-content.com/about/w ... torial.htm
If your article has been published elsewhere, you may NOT ask exclusive or full rights for it.

As an additional note, please use the new request system for submitting to public requests. This will ensure that your article gets reviewed in a timely manner and that it gets to the intended customer.

[Ed]

Information about the request system can be found here:
http://www.constant-content.com/help/re ... m_authors/

Do not submit content that is a rewrite of another person's article. Do not take information or phrasing directly from another source. Both of these practices will result in suspension for plagiarism. If you wish to reference web sources, you must do so in a manner that conforms to our guidelines by removing http://www.

Thanks,
Ed

[Cheanque]

Hi, All -

Ed makes a good point. I'm a new writer, and CC can be confusing to navigate. One thing I found helpful was to make a checklist. Go through the site (the FAQ, Writer's Guidelines, Forums, Blog, anything you can find) and list every item you can find on submitting work that's right. Items dealing with formatting, content, grammar - anything. Pay particular attention to the Rejection forum - it's a gold mine of helpful info from Ed and your fellow authors. Pan this gold, and add it to your check list. Like Jeopardy answers, your checklist items should be in the form of a question (for example, "Is my manuscript formatted in 12 pt. type?".

Once you've written your piece, print it out - it's hard to edit on-screen. Go down the list, item by item, and check off what's right. Make a note of what needs further attention.

Another idea is to bookmark the links Ed suggests in the blog and forum so you can easily refer to them. Mine are in a folder called "Craft".

One more nugget. I found a book at the library the other day titled "The Pen Commandments", by Steven Frank (copyright 2003, Anchor Books). It may be the best book on writing I've ever read. It's written for teens, but the writing is so clear and logical that adults years out of school can digest it with no trouble. He covers everything, from punctuation to paragraphs to overall structure. Get a copy - there's gold in them thar pages! (more)

[Cheanque]

(continued from previous post)

Keep learning. Like a miner exploring a played-out dig, I've uncovered wealth I never suspected was there - and realized I've forgotten a lot of what I thought I knew. Sentence structure, using commas, trimming words. All there for the prospecting.

So don't hurry. Think first, write second. We'll still make mistakes, but not as many. We'll still get rejections, but they'll be few and far between, caused more by snoozing at the keyboard or an editor's bad hair day than bad craftsmanship. And that's the crux - writing is art, but, like an old gold mine, it's buttressed by craft. Learn the craft, and keep digging.

[Ed]

Making a checklist is a great tip, Cheanque. I also suggest printing out the guidelines and hanging them somewhere easy to see.

Thanks,
Ed

[Lizaj]

[quote]
While some word processing programs automatically put spaces between paragraphs, the long summary form will not recognize these spaces if you have not manually pressed the “enter” key. It is the writer's responsibility to make sure these spaces appear. [/quote]

If it looks correctly spaced to us as it appears in the long summary form, can we safely assume that the spaces are really there?

Also just want to apologize for being on the guilty end of turning an article back around too quickly. I missed one of the reasons for rejection and so only fixed one. Crossing my fingers that I got it right this time! Guess I'm a little rusty.

[Celeste Stewart]

Liza,
I don't think the spacing is obvious when you first copy and paste it. After you hit "suubmit," go back and double check by going to Your Content>Edit. Then you'll see if the spacing is an issue or not. If your articles have the spacing issue, go into Word and change the default paragraph settings.

[Lizaj]

Thanks, Celeste and Good Morning!

[BarryDavidson]

If you're using IE (Internet Explorer), and it asks you if you'd like IE to clean up the post, click no. What IE does is removes the spaces between lines, and chokes up the whole post. This mostly happens when you copy/paste into the submission boxes.