SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• The ePISTLE is published every Thursday. All content should be available on the website by 5pm at trinityprinceton.org/epistle. An email newsletter will follow as quickly as possible to subscribers.

• Please send all submissions to epistle@trinityprinceton.org by no later than 5pm on Wednesday. Nothing submitted after this will be included until the following week. If it’s too late, it’s too late. Two to three weeks notice in advance of an event or time-sensitive announcement is recommended. Make sure to include a publicity plan in the early stages of your event organizing.

• Please include in the subject line the desired date of publication followed by a short but descriptive name, e.g., “1/5/22 Arm In Arm Collection.”

• Please send all text unformatted or with only basic formatting (italics, bold, etc.) in the body of the email itself, not as an attachment. When at all possible, avoid sending PDFs or Microsoft Word documents.

• If submitting a letter or essay, please include a title or one will be supplied at the editor’s discretion.

• If publicizing an event, please include the following information in the following format. Do not simply include date, time, and location information in the body of a paragraph describing the event.

  Event Title
  Date & Time
  Location
  Description (250 word maximum)
  Event Coordinator’s Name & Email Address

• If any illustrations or photographs are included, please ensure that they are in JPEG, GIF, or PNG formats. Please take care that illustrations or photographs are of sufficiently high-resolution to display well on modern devices. A minimum width of 600px is recommended. Images embedded in PDFs or in Word documents will not be included due to the onerousness of extracting them and the way that compression algorithms reduce their size and resolution. Alternative illustrations or photographs may be supplied at the editor’s discretion if those provided do not display well.

HOUSE STYLE & BEST PRACTICES

• Do not send paragraph text in ALL UPPERCASE LETTERS. All paragraphs should use normal capitalization conventions. ALL UPPERCASE LETTERS should not be used for emphasis or to draw attention to a message, the opposite tends to occur, since formatting blocks of text in ALL UPPERCASE LETTERS reduces shape contrast in the letters and degrades readability. They are also commonly perceived as aggressive, like shouting at your audience.

• Dates and times should be formatted Sunday, March 7 at 6pm or 8:30am; with the day and month spelled out, the numerals without ordinal indicators like 9th, and no spaces or periods between numerals or the letters of the morning and afternoon designators. Not adding spaces or periods in times and timeframes is especially important with web typography due to a lack of control over paragraph wrapping.

• When publicizing the date, time, and location following an event title, we prefer a natural construction that includes the day of the week, month, and day followed by the beginning time or timeframe and concluding with the name of the location, if necessary followed by the address or URL in parentheses. The date and time should be separated by a comma, and timeframes should be separated with an en-dash – and no spaces, morning or afternoon designators need only repeat if they differ (7am-5:30pm but 9-9:30am or 5-7pm). All information should be connected with appropriate prepositions, italicized. For example, Sunday, July 6, 7pm at Trinity Church in Pierce-Bishop Hall OR Saturday, October 13, 11am–1:30pm at Trinity Church on Stockton Lawn OR Wednesday, September 13, 3–5pm at Mt Pisgah AME Church (170 Witherspoon St, Princeton, NJ).

• Addresses should always use abbreviations without terminating periods (230 Park Pl, 12 Atlantic Ave, 33 Mercer St), acronyms for states (NJ, NY, PA), and unless being used for mailing, zip codes are unnecessary.

• Phone numbers should be formatted (000) 111-2222.

• The preferred format for acronyms is no spaces or periods between uppercase letters that are spoken as a collection of letters (ERD, BCP, ENS, CDC, etc.), while acronyms that are pronounced as words have only the first letter capitalized (Nasa, Unicef, Covid-19, etc.).

• Our title casing conventions are to capitalize the first letter of every word except prepositions, independent of their length, e.g., at, on, in, from, over, with, after, between, without.