Writers’ Guide

The Basics

• Use simple, conversational English – think of who you are writing for – ordinary folk like you and me. But don’t start your story or column with ‘hi everyone’ or ‘namaste’.
• Be concise – the average news story is about 200-250 words – its not a lot and the art is telling the story in that many words! Regular columns should no longer than 600 words please. Feature stories can be up to 800 words.
• Pictures tell 1000 words so include some high resolution images to attract readers to your story. People are rarely attracted to reading a full page of solid text.
• Double check people’s names. Even something that sounds simple like John Smith might be spelled Jon Smithe. A name is the one thing we all have throughout our lives, no matter what else happens. Let’s not get them wrong.
• Also double check dates of events. We’d hate people to turn up early or late for
  something they read about on our pages!
• Always answer the questions ‘who, what, when, where, how and why’ with your
  stories.
• Use double quotation marks for direct quotes, e.g. “This is my favourite time of the year,” Mr Smith said.
• Each sentence is a new paragraph – it dates back to the days when sub-editors cut stories for length by cutting from the bottom, which we will almost certainly do if your contribution exceeds 800 words.
• Include contact details so readers can find out more for themselves if need be.

Our house styles

• Do not excessively or unnecessarily capitalise words that don’t deserve them. Only proper nouns or full titles need capital letters.
• Numbers – use the words for all amounts up to and including nine – and use numerals for 10 to whatever. The exception to this is school grades – we use:
  Year 1, Year 10, Year 5, etc.
• Please note the capital Y in Year, by the way. You need a comma in a figure after 9999 … so use them from 10,000 and up.
• Put ‘said’ after their name – its our quoting style. e.g. “I love country music,” Mr Urban said.
• Quotes within paragraphs use single quote marks: The mayor said the development was ‘significantly flawed’.
• Compound adjectives – if two or more words are used to create one adjective, they need to be hyphenated… six-year-old boy, 15-month jail term, five-and-a-half times larger, $15-million development.
  
  You also need them when it is inferred as an adjective: The six-year old later won the event.
• Something, such as a time, is either ‘at’ or ‘about’ it cannot be both … ‘at’ is precise, ‘about’ is less certain. “It happened at 11.13am” police said. “It happened about 11am”, police said. It is either ’12pm’ or ‘noon’ – never ’12 noon’.
  
  You don’t need the word ‘time’ when what you are referring to is a measure of time: in 12 weeks’ time… in five hours time… in a year’s time. Just use: in 12 weeks… five hours… a year.
• Titles of books, films, albums, plays etc should be italicised. The band played a cover version of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. We went to the movies to see Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
• Title always precedes name: The president of the Nimbin Farnarkling Society, Bob Dooley.
• Abbreviations – at first mention use the name in full with the abbreviation in brackets: Nimbin Farnarkle Society (NFS) … and now ask yourself why you are abbreviating it … can you name it first then use a collective noun… The Nimbin Farnarkle Society will meet today. The society was formed in 1889. Often abbreviations, unless commonly used ones (ABC, ATSCI, etc) are just confusing.
• It is either ‘at’ or ‘about’ it cannot be ‘at about’. ‘at’ is definite, ‘about’ is less certain. At 5.03pm the car hit the house. The car crashed about 5pm, police said.
• A comma is rarely needed in front of the word ‘and’ – unless in this kind of case.. ‘The man, who was tall and thin, and the woman were arrested later that day.’ You don’t need a comma when it is a ‘list’ of things… ‘The car, the house, the boat and the caravan were all stolen.’
• Please do not use ‘whilst’ and ‘amongst’ – our style is ‘while’ and ‘among’. And luncheon is out too, sadly – its just ‘lunch’.

Grammar and other trivialities

• It is usually ‘in’ a town, city, etc, not ‘at’ – in Lismore… in Sydney… in Coraki. ‘Was’ is singular, ‘were’ is plural.
• ‘Who’ for people, ‘that’ for things. “Who’s” means ‘who is’ – while ‘whose’ means ‘belonging to’ – passengers whose luggage was screened.
• The word ‘till’ is for the thing you keep money in – you mean ‘until’.
• ‘Over’ – means ‘on top of’ (e.g. The roof is over the house) – so use ‘during’ for time or ‘more than’ for amount.
• ‘Last’ means ‘final’ – for time or occurrence use ‘past’. e.g. In the past six months …
• ‘Very’ – most times is not needed. Something is or isn’t.
• Same goes for ‘both’ … usually not needed. e.g. ‘The man and woman both died’ isn’t as succient as ‘The man and the woman died.’
• ‘From’ – is pertaining to location/source so use ‘by’ instead. e.g. ‘He was injured by a car’, not ‘from a car’.
• Inanimate objects can’t see. “The event will see 5000 people party hard.” No it won’t. “About 6000 people are expected to party hard at the event.”
• The only thing that ‘kicks off’ is a football match. “The concert kicks off at 7pm,” is clichéd to buggery – just say “it starts”, please. Things like ‘the golf day kicks off at 8am’ are just silly.
• ‘Under way’ is always two words – so is ‘thank you.’
• ‘Post mortem’ is Latin for ‘after death’ – so you mean a post mortem examination for the procedure done after death. No one ‘suicides’ they ‘commit suicide’.
• Almost nothing these days is ‘unique’ – that word means only one of its kind on the planet, if not the cosmos. Avoid it.
• Nobody is impressed by use of the word ‘eclectic’ in music reviews.

and finally…

• Irony is “a figure of speech or literary device in which the literal meaning is the opposite of that intended.” Be careful about referring to something as being ironic… if it isn’t!

We hope these tips are helpful.
Thank you for your contributions to community media.

Fri 23rd January 2026