SSNET Posting Style Guide
For More Effective Writing At Any Time
Edit your post for the following:
- Check to see what adjectives, adverbs and descriptive phrases you could leave out without losing your intended effect. (Sometimes these descriptors dilute rather than emphasize. Use strong verbs and nouns instead of adverbs and adjectives.)
- See if there’s anything you can say just as well and usually more effectively with fewer words. See if you can substitute phrases for clauses and strong nouns or verbs for descriptive phrases in order to strengthen your prose.
- Use the active voice of verbs rather than the passive voice, when possible.
“Jeremy broke the window.”
Not: “The window was broken by Jeremy.” - As a general rule, try not to start your sentences with “But,” “And,” “Or,” or similar words. But there are exceptions – like this “but” used for emphasis.
- Avoid using frequent or lengthy quotations. They dilute your post. Since there is nothing new under the sun, it is expected that the ideas of others will have influenced your thinking. Just make sure you have digested these ideas to make them your own, and then write them in your own words. If you borrow quite specific ideas, you may need to footnote them. Quotations should generally be quite short, no more than about 25 words.
- Avoid using too many Bible texts. It is better to use one text and use it in such a way that it sticks in the mind than to use many texts like buck shot.
- Make sure your paragraphs relatively short, about three sentences or 100 words max to make for easier reading.
The active voice of verbs is usually more effective than the passive voice:
Write: “Please note”
Not: “It should be noted.
Write: I learned God’s ways as I was growing up
Or possibly: My parents taught me God’s ways when I was growing up.
Not: God’s ways were taught to me when growing up.
Write: God gave me a great gift.
Not: I was given a great gift by God.
Write: Cats eat fish.
Not: Fish are eaten by cats.
Write: Everybody drinks water.
Not: Water is drunk by everybody.
Correct Use of the Passive Voice:
Passive verbs are not automatically wrong. When used rarely and deliberately, the passive voice serves an important purpose.
o When you wish to downplay the action or the actor:
Mistakes will be made, and lives will be lost; the sad truth is learned anew by each generation.
Three grams of reagent ‘A’ were added to a beaker of 10% saline solution. (In the scientific world, the actions of a researcher are ideally not supposed to affect the outcome of an experiment; the experiment is supposed to be the same no matter who carries it out.)
o When the actor is unknown:
The victim was approached from behind and hit over the head with a salami.
o Don’t use passive verbs simply to avoid using “I.”
Specific Sabbath School Net Styles
Punctuation and font styling
- Use only one space between sentences.
- Periods and commas always come before an ending quotation mark: He said, “It is good.” NOT He said, “It is good”.
- Question marks and exclamation marks may become before or after an ending quotation mark: If the mark belongs to the quotation, put it before: He asked, “What are you doing here?” If it belongs to the whole sentence, put it after: Did Jesus say, “Deny yourself”?
- Please avoid adding your own styles to sub-headings. Use the headings in the “Paragraph” drop-down menu. That way the post will always look good, even when the overall template is changed.
- Use the built-in bolding <strong> or italicizing <em> options instead of *this kind of emphasis.*
- Use the en-dash for dashes, with a space before and after, instead of hyphens or em dashes. There is a horse-shoe-like icon in the second icon row. (activated by the “kitchen sink” button. Hover over buttons if you have no idea what that is.) This icon gives access to special characters, including the en-dash.
- It is not necessary to hyperlink biblical references to BibleGateway. These are hyperlinked automatically through a script. Furthermore, scripted hyperlinks will work ten years from now, even if BibleGateway changes its strategy (should the world last that long.)
Titles
Capitalize all words except articles, such as “a” or “the.”
Specific Style Elements:
- All references to the Bible or Scripture are capitalized. However adjectives such as “biblical” and “scriptural” are not capitalized.
- All noun references to the Godhead are capitalized. Examples: God, Christ, Jesus, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Bridegroom, Counselor, Wonderful, etc.
- All pronoun references to the Godhead are similarly capitalized. Examples: He, His, Him.
- The correct spelling and capitalization of our church name is this: Seventh-day Adventist Church. When used as a noun adjective, spell and capitalize it the same way: Seventh-day Adventist. (Note the lower-case d.)
- When referring to our church either in noun or adjective form, please use the full name in the first reference (i.e. Seventh-day Adventist). In subsequent references “Adventist” and “SDA” are fine. It is often good to use both, since people search on both variants, with older generations and people from Asia and Africa searching for “SDA,” rather than “Adventist.”
References
For most references, use the following pattern in parentheses after the quotation:
Book, with one author
William H. Rehnquist, The Supreme Court: A History, p. 204.
Supreme Court, p. 21. [For subsequent references to the same book.]
Book, with two or three authors
Michael D. Coe and Mark Van Stone, Reading the Maya Glyphs, pp. 129-30.
Book, with four or more authors
Lynn Hunt et al., The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, p. 541.
Book, with no known author
The Men’s League Handbook on Women’s Suffrage, p. 23.
Book, edited without an author
Jack Beatty, ed., Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America, p. 127.
Book, edited with an author
Ted Poston, A First Draft of History, ed. Kathleen A. Hauke, p. 46.
Book, from a multivolume work
James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, vol. 2, The Civil War, p. 205.
Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of European Social History: From 1350 to 2000, III: 271.