Enlivening Edge Magazine Writer’s Guidelines

UPCOMING DEADLINES

December 9 is the deadline for submitting original articles that could be eligible to be mentioned in the end-of-December emailed EE Magazine Highlights. Later articles might be considered.

But you don’t need to wait for a deadline! Submit your article anytime. We publish articles to the EE magazine site as they become ready, and those are then available to be selected for inclusion in the next bi-monthly Magazine Highlights.

Articles or suggested republications on any  topic related to our readers are welcome.

MOST-DESIRED TOPICS

Our overall emphasis these days consequent to our Evolutionary Purpose is overviews of what is happening on the macro level of changes in human organizational life. What are new movements? How are old movements growing or not? What networks are connecting with which other networks? What collaborations among groups are emerging? And/or what is happening in various countries or regions or sectors?
Other angles of greatest interest and value to our readers are:
  • personal stories of a next-stage journey​: challenges, resources, triumphs​
  • organizational stories/case studies
  • tools and practices.
​We’re moving away from publishing so many views and perspectives, opinions, and general advice.
Specific articles we’d love to have:
  • A review of Gary Hamel’s book Humanocracy.
  • An annotated vetted list of next-stage organizational training programs such as Corporate Rebels Academy

USEFUL GUIDANCE FOR OUR WRITERS

Read more about our ongoing collection of “little personal stories” project with the bilingual Russian-English site  at  http://seeds4future.com/about/.
How does your article idea fit Enlivening Edge Magazine’s audience and their interests?
Tips for making your writing for EE Magazine even brighter and attracting more readers.

SHAPING YOUR ARTICLE FOR SUBMISSION

Length: Please aim for 500 to 1000 words. Occasionally we publish longer, 1700 to 2500 words.

Text Requirements

Please format your piece in order to create a pleasurable reading experience, guiding the reader’s eye, and conveying your message clearly:

  • Short paragraphs (for online writing, a good rule of thumb is no more than 5 lines per paragraph.) You can safely ignore the rest of this sentence: IF you are super-professional, here are some details about the formatting of article text on the website: width: 750px font: Open Sans (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans) font size: .95 em ( approximately 15pt)
  • Short sentences (about 300 characters including spaces)
  • Use bullet points and do not use numbered lists.
  • Use sub-headings, in bold font.
  • Include some standout/pull(out)/breakout/”block” quotes.

Please give your article a real title, not “Article for Enlivening Edge.” 🙂

Titles show up best in our magazine format if they are 60 or fewer characters including spaces, but minimum 30 characters including spaces.

Use pull-quotes/block quotes sparingly. They serve to entice readers into your article or to highlight a key topic. Too many of them causes them to lose that distinctive function, and disrupts the flow of reading. We recommend 1 pull quote, if any at all, for shorter articles (500 words); maximum 2 pull quotes for articles of 1,000 words, and maximum 3 pull quotes for longer articles.

If you need some inspiration, look at websites you visit frequently to read articles, and observe what they do to make things easy for you as a reader.

Punctuation Requests (Optional)

proofreader

Pity the poor proofreaders (and have a laugh at the alliterations) and save them hours of work:

 

If you include dashes, please be mindful to use em-dashes —, not hyphens – or double-hyphens — or en-dashes –. Put no space before or after the em-dash—like this.

If you want to use the European convention around the relationship of punctuation marks at the end of sentences, please use it consistently. That means “. or “? versus the American convention .” or ?” Just be consistent.

Please use ”  ” for all quotations, and ‘  ‘ only for quotations within quotations.

Please italicize titles of books, do not put them in double or single quote marks.

Capitalization Requests (Optional)

Please capitalize first letter of words Teal, Green, Orange, and other “stage”-name colors.

In your title, please capitalize first letter of all important words.

In sub-headings, please capitalize the first letter of the first word, and make the rest lower-case, bolded font.

Image-related Requirements

Images in your article

Every image we use has to be taken by you, or be available via Creative Commons licensing which allows Commercial use and modification (resizing/cropping.)

Articles with visuals get 94% more responses than those without. Please indicate if you desire an image to be in a particular place, otherwise the Writing Quality Amplifier will decide.

Please send all images as email attachments to mageditor @ enliveningedge.org, and indicate where in your Word document each one goes.

Featured Image

EE’s Magazine format requires a “Featured Image” for each article, in addition to any images you’d like to include within the article. The Featured Image is displayed on the main page, and above all text in the article, and serves as hyperlink for reader navigation in several places on the site.

We strongly request that you as author provide one, rather than our Editor having to search for one and perhaps use one you don’t even like! The required size for a Featured Image for EE Magazine use is 1518 x 1000 pixels. We have no flexibility on these numbers.

If you send a larger image, the ratio of width to height needs to be the same. Please do not send a smaller image, as the resolution usually suffers. The minimum resolution is 72 dpi.

We do have a preferred “style” or “feel” of our Featured Images. Browse our Home page to get a sense. We like real photos, not drawings or graphics, and no harsh colors. Photos need to be pleasing to the eye and the spirit, and need to reflect the meaning of the subject of the article.

Author Information Requirements

The top line of your article should be “By [Your Name] for Enlivening Edge Magazine.”

As part of your Word document, please provide a 3-sentence bio (in italics) and an URL if you want your name to be linked to it, and/or an email address for you or other way for readers to contact you.

As an email attachment, not in your document, please also provide a headshot photo of you, author picture

in .jpg or .png format, and about 1.5 inches square or 200×200 pixels, or close to that size and shape.

References/Bibliography Requirements

If you reference something on the web, such as a specific author, project, organization, or book, please include the URL, or better yet, insert your own hyperlink to the URL from the relevant text words.

Please use whatever reference punctuation and formatting standard you are familiar with.

You must indicate when you are quoting or referencing someone else’s writing, rather than using your original words.

We strongly urge all of our writers to look over the Reinventing Organizations Wiki main page for references to topics/concepts in your article, and provide your readers links to those pages of the wiki.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Please submit your article as an editable Word (or similar word-processing program) document by email (as an attachment) to EE Magazine Editor mageditor @ enliveningedge.org. Please do not submit your article as a Google doc. Editing just doesn’t work well for us that way.

By submitting an article, you give us permission to make proofreading and light copy-edit changes without consulting you prior to publication. It is our policy that if we have more substantive changes to suggest, that will be done in conversation with you. If you want other arrangements, let us know ahead.

If you have ownership or copyright concerns, or if your article is being published simultaneously elsewhere, or has been published before, please discuss with EE Magazine Editor (mageditor @ enliveningedge.org) when you send in your article, or even earlier in the process.

By default, all of our articles are published with this status: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. So if you want something different, please let the EE Magazine Editor (mageditor @ enliveningedge.org) know before the article is published.

WHEN TO SEND YOUR ARTICLE

Please respect this deadline mentioned above. You might think “Oh, they can make an exception for me,” and possibly we can, but when 12-15 people all do this 2-3 weeks after the deadline, the pacing of our activity becomes a harmful tsunami, unsustainable. We might need to postpone your article for several weeks.

It’s important to understand that we publish articles in our website/magazine continually, and our New Article Notification subscribers are emailed about each new item on the day it appears. The Magazine Highlights is emailed every other month to its own subscriber list.

AFTER YOUR ARTICLE IS PUBLISHED

Harvesting the fruits of having your article published

To be notified when your article is published, if you don’t already receive EE’s emailed New Article Notifications, subscribe here.

When your article is published, if you go and make a first comment, that will encourage others to comment. Our system notifies you of any comments, so you can respond if you wish, and be in a generative conversation with readers. That’s a huge part of your reason for writing, isn’t it? And a huge part of Enlivening Edge’s Evolutionary Purpose.

QUESTIONS NOT ADDRESSED HERE?

Please let us know how these Writer’s Guidelines could be more helpful and informative, via the Contact Us form.