Unscripted - The Childfree Life

Unscripted Needs You Today!

by Martha Kneib

If you’re a regular reader of Unscripted, you know that recently, we’ve been forced to shelve two issues. And, as you can see, the March issue is a bit thin.

We need you!

We’re not trolling for your money, but your talent. Our goal every month is to debut 8-10 new articles from childfree people around the world on a wide variety of topics. But we can’t do it without you!

Our guidelines are available on the net, but I will also copy and paste them here, too. We need articles that are at least 600 words long written in a newsy inverted triangle style.

Have a hobby? A favorite TV show? A movie you’d like to spread the word about? An opinion on something in the news? You can email us (email addys on the “About Us” page) your story anytime, but be prepared to rewrite if necessary.

Thanks for reading!

Martha

Our Guidelines

1. When in doubt, consult the Chicago Manual of Style. Make use of the serial comma.

2. Please submit articles to Martha or Ashley. Articles should be over 600 words long. Shorter than that, you’re probably not going to be able to tackle the subject adequately.

3. Turn articles in by the 20th of the month, and be prepared to rewrite if necessary.

4. Make sure you submit a 1-2 sentence bio (more if you want) to the Unscripted editor so that it can be included on our “About Us” page.

5. Separate paragraphs with empty spaces. Do not use tabs.

6. If you want a bulleted list, use an asterisk for each line followed by one blank. They will show up like this:

7. If you would like any text to be italics or bold, please insert the HTML codes. If you’re not comfortable with these, then the editor will insert them for you. However, anything you can do to make her job easier will be appreciated.

8. Make sure you’ve read a few issues of Unscripted so that you know what we want. Please do not send us blog or journal entries. Also, at this point, we have seen multiple articles on “Why I’m Childfree,” so if you’d like to submit something like that, please consider what’s unique about your story and use that as your angle.

9. Feature stories should be written in an inverted triangle format. Any search engine should bring up what you need with a search on “feature writing” or “inverted triangle style.”

Copyright . Published 1 March 2008 in .

Reader comments

  1. Annonymous

    There are a lot of creative people out there biting at the bit to contribute. However, a portion of them are not fans of formatting (if there were, there wouldn’t be so many editors in the world, would there?). For these creative people, taking a second look at your invitation and seeing a long list of anal retentive rules on how to write your piece could be very off putting, to say the least. Maybe offer editorial services for the not so rule inclined, so to speak? Just a suggestion, for what it’s worth. Who knows, maybe then you’ll have enough contributers to put some meat onto this subscription’s paltry bones.

    permalink — 20 March 2008, 14:12

  2. Martha

    Thanks for your comments. However, I’m afraid if you think proper formatting, grammar, and punctuation are too much to bother with, Unscripted is not the publication for you. Good luck elsewhere.

    permalink — 26 March 2008, 20:16

Commenting is closed for this article.