Submission Guidelines for Articles and News.

The following encompasses a guideline for authors submitting work to the Wired West website and administrative editors who will be reviewing submitted news and articles. Other than numbers 1, 2, and 3 (which are mandatory) these are meant for guidance only and may be ignored at the editors discretion.

1. Content should be checked for spelling and grammatical errors (loose - not formal, UK English -ise, not International English -ize).

2. Under no circumstances should there be expletives, defamatory or slanderous statements, racist or negative content, - even if this is marked as the authors opinion.

3. Criticism or favouritism towards another person, organisation, product or service is to be avoided unless the article is a genuine, unbiased review. In this case a comparison of several alternative solutions is preferable.

4. An authors credit is to be encouraged but if possible should be restricted to the end of the article. Contact details are also acceptable but should if possible be limited to a web address or phone number, to avoid misuse of their email by spam-trawlers.

5. Blatant advertising is to be discouraged unless pertinent to the overall content.

6. A brief introduction to set the authors credentials is, however, acceptable.

7. Content should be broken into small paragraphs of no more than four sentences per paragraph - this makes it easier for rapid scanning on screen.

8. Pages should be no deeper than two scrolls in depth - additional content should be spread across subsequent pages and marked as such - 1 of 6, for example.

9. Less commonly recognised technical terms should be accompanied by an explanation either in parentheses (...), or as a footnote marked at the appropriate point in the text.

10. Formatting, such as bold and italics should be used sparingly throughout the content. Bold should be used to emphasise a key word or phrase (but not an entire paragraph), and italics to indicate a quotation.

11. Underlining of words should not be used at all to avoid the reader confusing the text for a hyper-link. Instead bold or italics should be used.

12. Editors should not attempt to rewrite copy but should instead raise any concerns with the author outlining the text in question and suggesting an alternative. It is the authors responsibility to rewrite any copy.

Please send your article or news to info@wiredwest.co.uk