Guidelines for Writing Reviews
To help make review writing as easy as possible, has written the following guidelines for you to use in writing reviews. But before we get to those, I would like to explain review policy and the reasoning for it.
sends copies of our newsletter to software, hardware and book vendors that may be interested in sending a representative to our meetings to demonstrate their product. We also send copies of our newsletter when we request a product for review purposes.
When a review is published, we send a copy of the issue with the review to the company. This way, they not only see what our track record is for publishing reviews, but they also know that the word is getting out about their program.
Note that the above paragraph does not mean vendors expect a glowing review of the products they give us. A fair review is all that is expected. If there are major problems with a product, we may suggest the review be sent to the vendor before publication to see if they can help solve the problem. If the problems can be solved, the review can be altered. However, in no way will be pressured into changing a fair review.
Vendors have been quite willing to send us goodies to review, but they will not be so generous if they don’t see reviews published in our newsletter. They do have a motive: they want publicity for their product. We are exchanging publicity in our club’s newsletter for a copy of the product. In most cases, the reviewer keeps the product.
Review Rules
Products received by will remain the property of until the review is handed in. At that point, the product becomes the property of the reviewer.
Reviews must be done in a timely fashion. The review should be done and published not more than 2 months after the reviewer receives the package. No club member will have more than 1 item in their possession. Once you turn in a review, you are able to take out something else. A list will be maintained in the newsletter, showing what products are out for review and who the reviewer is. We’ll also list the products that have been requested for review, and those recently received for review.
Submitting a Review
There are a few ways to get the review to the newsletter staff. · on disk at the meetings when the BBS software asks for a description, start with “NEWSLETTER ARTICLE” in all caps. This will help us find it.
Formatting
We currently use Adobe Pagemaker to lay out the newsletter. The following word processor formats are acceptable as input (current versions preferable):
* ASCII text
* Microsoft Word
* Microsoft Word for Windows
* WordPerfect
Having listed the above, we would really like to have the files in good old, plain vanilla ASCII format. Most of the formatting you do in the above word processors is lost when the Newsletter is formatted. Most word processors are capable of writing files in ASCII format. If you have special formatting needs, submit the review both as a file and printed out from your word processor. We will duplicate the formatting as best we can in Pagemaker.
If you have screen shots or photos, artwork or illustrations the best format is JPG. Second choice would be GIF.
Formatting Tips
Here are a few things you can do to simplify the job of adding your review to the newsletter. Single space after a full-stop.Most of us were taught to put two spaces after a period, question mark, exclamation mark, etc., but desktop publishing software will automatically insert the proper spacing after each full-stop, so you don’t have to. Since it’s hard to break the habit, the easiest way to do this is after you are finished the review, use your word processor’s search and replace function to replace all occurrences of two spaces with one space.
NO TABS! NO TABS! NO TABS!
Extra spaces are a pain in desktop publishing, but tabs are a nightmare. Please, NO TABS!
Spell check it.Spell checkers don’t catch everything, but they do catch enough to be worth the effort.
Special formatting requests. If you have special formatting, simply write them in where required. Enclose the instructions in braces { } like so:
{indent next paragraph .5″ in from the left & right }
Since braces are used so rarely, it is easy to spot them in the text.
Review Guidelines
These are guidelines only! Don’t let them stand in the way of your personal writing style. Please feel free to use whatever order you think is best. For instance, you could put the Support information at the end in the Summation. Add or delete options as you see fit or that are the most/least important to you.