Newsletter/Blog Changes.
Up until now we have been collecting articles for the newsletter and broadcasting them on the blog after publication. This has resulted in topical articles being published ridiculously late, so from here on in we will prioritise the blog over the newsletter.
This means that the newsletter will consist largely of abstracts with links leading to the relevant blog posts as well as updates on events and society notes. This will also, hopefully, make the newsletter much easier to write each month. The editorial will most likely remain original to the newsletter as will any and all letters and opinion pieces that come in.
Submissions.
We’ll also be developing some submissions polices, including – in the first instance – a word count of between 750-1000 (max.). This month saw Secretary Jonathan Lomax’s first blog post, an interesting back and forth with a fundamentalist.
Worthy as this article was it nevertheless came in at 5325 words which resulted in it dominating the blog feed. In future, articles of such size should be divided up into several parts and submitted periodically (apart from anything else, this actually allows us to schedule new posts several weeks in advance).
It's also an idea to keep the text generously spaced with a line break after 3-4 sentences (i.e. - loads of short paragraphs), this helps prevent articles from looking like solid walls of text.
I'll always do some token proofreading and editing whenever I read through a new article, I am far from perfect when it comes to slapdash grammar and spelling errors, but that shouldn't prevent anyone from posting. If I notice any errors I'll change them, if the true rendering of the sentence is too obscure for me to correct, I'll get in touch.
(If anyone else notices any such problems or any broken links, then please get in touch here (or flag them up as a comment) so that I can fix them.)
Contributors.
As ever, we're looking for contributors who are prepared to volunteer some of their time to fill our blog with interesting and engaging content. The more the merrier (it's actually quite an onerous task keeping a blog up to date).
Blogs are not only forums for news, but also for the expression of opinion and the development of ideas. As students we do that all the time, so feel free to talk about your current coursework, recent essays or ideas that have fired your imagination, especially if they have a bearing on secularism and other related topics. If you're unsure as to whether an article is appropriate pass it onto me here and I'll give it a read through.
Twitter Round Up.
James and I also agree that we should have a weekly round up of the best tweets we’ve seen on our feed. It seems a bit of a shame that these interesting news links should be restricted only to those members who use twitter, so once a week we’ll post a list of them up on the blog for a wider audience.
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