Ideas for upcoming issues are encouraged three months or more before the issue is printed. Stories are assigned two months out. If you are pitching for July, you should send your idea to us by April 1.
Your editor will give you a due date upon assignment, or upon acceptance of your pitch. Please note that you may be asked to make changes following submission. These should be made within two days of the request. We reserve the right to edit the story following your final submission. Stories received that do not match the agreed upon guidelines or are received after the agreed upon due date may not be printed or paid for.
When you turn in your story, please send us an invoice with your name, address and SSN. Your payment will be mailed to you inside a copy of the issue your story appears in shortly after publication.
Stories that are assigned may also be posted on our web page. If you do not wish to have your work published on the danceruniverse.com website please inform your editor at the time of submission.
Photos
Art Director contact: ElizabethMiller@danceruniverse.com
All writers are required to supply at least four accompanying photos for their articles. Photos should be 300 dpi print quality, or 1MB+ in size.
All pictures should be emailed to: Laura Diffenderfer <laura@danceruniverse.com> (Editor) and Elizabeth Miller <elizabethmiller@danceruniverse.com> (Art Director)
Note: if a high quality image is not provided, the article may not receive high prominence, especially in news sections, so please inform subjects that providing the highest quality art will result in greatest visibility.
If the photo is of a specific dancer or dancers, the image must have credit of both the dancer and the photographer. To eliminate confusion, please label images with dancer's name(s) and the company name, if applicable, followed by the photo credit, followed by a double-digit number if there are multiple pictures (if there is only one picture you don't need to do this). Also note – if the image is of more than 3-4 dancers, please just give the company name.
Ex: JohnDancer_byJanePhotographer_01.jpg
MaryNoname_SueNoname_DanceCompany_ byJanePhotographer 03.tiff
DanceCompany_ byJanePhotographer 04.psd
Instructions for stock photos:
In situations where there is not a specific dancer/company/person or where Dancer doesn't have photos, please contact the editor and art director. Please note: neither Google searches nor images found on fFickr will not automatically result in royalty free images. If you have any questions regarding images please contact the art director. Thank you for all of your hard work!
Notes on Style
Capitalization:
The beginnings of sentences and the first letters of proper nouns should be capitalized. Beyond that, capitalization should be avoided. This means that a person's professional title (artistic director, guest choreographer, etc.) should not utilize capitalization.
Please avoid capitalizing parts of the body or any other improper nouns, e.g., "annual showcase" should not be capitalized.
Please do not capitalize an entire word for intended emphasis.
Cardinal Number Use:
A number higher than nine is written numerically ("10" then, as opposed to "eight). Numbers lower than ten are usually spelled as words. There are exceptions:
- "Thousand," "hundred" and "million" are written out as words. Avoid long numbers with lots of zeros.
- When writing a person's age, use this pattern of digits and dashes: a 7-year-old, 55-year-old, etc.
- An address is always written numerically, as in "5 Avenue."
- Dimensions (4 feet wide and 7 feet long) are written numerically.
Ordinal Number Use:
Avoid any numbers with the "th" in superscript. This means: Write out "sixth" instead of 6th, "fifteenth" instead of 15th, etc.
Composition Titles:
Use quotation marks on all performing arts titles, either a full-length ballet ("The Sleeping Beauty")
or a piece/variation ("The Rose Adagio") or ("The Producers").
Italics:
Use italics for all written text (books, newspapers, magazines).
Quotations:
Quote the speaker in the present rather than the past tense, e.g., "This is an amazing production," dancer John Doe says. "Our choreographers are terrific," he adds.
When quotation marks are used at the end of a sentence, the period should always go inside the end quote.
e.g.: "This is an amazing production." Perhaps Doe's most memorable performance was in "Petrushka." Although, he says, "My favorite ballet is 'Swan Lake.'"
Commas should also go before the quotation mark:
e.g., "This is an amazing production," dancer John Doe says. Although his most famous role is in "Petrushka," Doe's favorite ballet is "Swan Lake."
Punctuation:
Please keep exclamation points to a conservative minimum. Never use any double exclamation points. When a website is within a sentence, that sentence must still end with a period, e.g.: "For more information, please go to www.gainesvilleballet.org."
Commas: In lists of three or more nouns, do not use a comma between the last two - the word "and" is sufficient.
Some General Style Rules to Follow:
- Refer to the speaker, as well as any person you are writing about, by their last name. The last name is what you want the reader to remember most (it, more than a first name, identifies a person in their field. Do this even if you are 'on a first-name basis' with your subject because the reader, in all likelihood, is not).
- Time: Use lowercase letters and periods: 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3:30 p.m. Use figures except for noon and midnight.
- Spacing and Alignment: Leave once space at the end of a sentence. Left-align your document and leave two spaces between paragraphs.
- Always title your article or column.
- Always write your byline and write as, "By Writer Name" and not "Byline: Writer Name"
