Style Guides

I wrote and distributed the following tutorial to instruct writers on how to properly crop and size feature photos for their articles in WordPress. Feature photos should be landscape (horizontal) and cropped to a 4:3 aspect ratio.  This short tutorial demonstrates how to crop a vertical photo, but the same process can be used to crop a horizontal photo to the correct dimensions.   To crop a photo, click the “crop” button.  A dotted box will appear around the photo. In the “aspect ratio” boxes, enter 4:3.  The box will resize to that ratio. You can move this resized box. You can also resize this box by grabbing the corner and dragging it.  Just make sure the aspect ratio remains 4:3. Once you have finished, click “crop.” ...

When I began copy editing for The Mint Hill Times, I noticed a few problems: Writers routinely failed to include speaker tags with quotations or to include a source for clearly paraphrased facts and figures. Writers were routinely making mistakes with basic punctuation and capitalization surrounding quotations. Many writers relied on either quotations or paraphrased information, failing to mix the two in a way that created a compelling story. To address these problems, I created the following tutorial. A quotation must always be accompanied by a speaker tag.  If you’re only interviewing one person and you’ve just mentioned their name, it can be as simple as “he said” or “she said,” but it needs to be there.  There are three places your speaker tag can sit: before the quote...

I created the following brief tutorial to instruct The Mint Hill Times' writing staff on how to properly caption and describe photos in WordPress. For every photo you add to your article, please go into the “Add media” tab and fill in ALL the information on the right. Alt Text - describes images to users who are unable to see them.  Generally, this can be the same text as the image caption. Caption - short phrase that describes what is happening in the photo.  Make sure to include names and locations if applicable. Description - identifying information for the photograph and where it came from (e.g. “Photo by Mary Beth Foster,” “Photo provided by Mary Beth Foster,” “Pixabay free download”).

The following document is an example of a general editing checklist I created and distributed to The Mint Hill Times writing staff. It covers information like capitalization in titles, formatting times and phone numbers, and including hyperlinks as agree upon by the paper's leadership team. It also demonstrates my ability to work within a Content Management System like WordPress. Capitalize the first letter of each word in your title Include the location in all caps at the beginning of your article.  The format is CITY, STATE(space)-(space).  For articles that are more widely applicable, you can use CHARLOTTE (no state necessary). When listing times in your article, please use the following format: from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm. When including a phone number in ...