Newsletter submission guidelines
Program Chairperson:
Initial course information submitted should include:

• the date of the lecture
• the name of the speaker
• the course title (if the lecturer is presenting both a Tuesday night lecture and an all day lecture, make sure you get titles for both)
• a bio for the speaker
• a course synopsis (if the lecturer is presenting both a Tuesday night lecture and an all day lecture, make sure you get titles for both)
• contact the newsletter editor for an example of previous year’s program labels so that you can make up a new one for your year.
• speaker’s photos should be of good quality, meaning that they should:
• be taken by someone other than themselves (not taken by holding the camera at arm’s length and shooting their own picture)
• be taken with adequate lighting in the room
• be taken against a light colored background
• be taken without a bunch of “stuff” behind them (blinds, books, reflection of the flash, etc.)
• be taken wearing the type of clothes that they would wear while giving the lecture
• be in tiff or jpeg format
• be at least an inch tall by an inch wide for decent resolution when printing.

The bio and synopsis should be put together and formatted to fit the allotted space in the newsletter. Here’s how to do this:

• go to the archives section of our web site (www.MCDSofNJ.org username mcds, password sy). Pick any newsletter where there is a lecture at that month’s meeting (any month but January – officer’s night, or May – staff night).
• go to either the html version or pdf version.
• copy that speaker’s bio and course synopsis
• open up Microsoft Word or whatever other word processing program that you prefer.
• paste into a new document (I’ll refer to this as the example document below).
• select all of the text and format it as Times New Roman, 11 point. You can now see how many lines this needs to be to fit.
• open up another new document (I’ll refer to this as the working document below).
• copy and paste the speaker’s bio into the working document.
• copy and paste the course synopsis into the working document.
• arrange the example and working documents so you can see both windows (side by side will work fine).
• edit, delete out, consolidate, etc. the information in the working document so that it matches the length of the example document. Examples of how to do this include:
• abbreviate the name of the school that they went to if it is spelled out (NYU instead of New York University).
• abbreviate any organizations that they belong to that we can presume to be familiar with (ADA, FAGD, etc.).
• prioritize bio information to include where they went to school and current activities. Delete out hobbies, side interests, to whom they have given previous lectures, specific publications or contributions to the literature, etc.
• consolidate bullet points onto the same line
• rephrase as necessary

For full day courses:

• go to the home page of the member portion of our web site.
• click on the CE Courses button.
• select an example year, such as 2008-2009.
• copy and paste into a word document as per above to make sure the bios and synopses will fit.
• email these individually to the newsletter editor.
• notify the newsletter editor regarding:
• course dates
• fees for each participant category (MCDS member, NJDA member, Non-member)
• end of early registration dates for each course
• whether or not staff are invited to each course
• the sponsor of each course
• how many CE credits will be given for each course

Anyone who is submitting a report for inclusion in the minutes:
The easiest way to see what I need is to look at a previous copy of a newsletter and look at the formatting of the reports. Specifically:

• The report should be in paragraph format with no first line indents. The text should flow in sentence form as much as possible (e.g. “The event was held at the high school” vs. “Where: The high school”).
• All sentences should be capitalized properly.
• There should be one space between sentences, not two (two spaces were formerly used when mono spaced fonts were the norm, as with typewriters. With proportional fonts like Times New Roman, one space is the accepted practice).
• Reports that are copied and pasted into emails are formatted with line breaks on the receiving end. When I copy and paste these reports into my page layout program, I have to remove the line breaks. If you have Microsoft Word, please use this program to write your report and attach the Word document to your email to send it. If you don’t have Word, you can continue to submit the report as you are doing.
• Please use the font Times New Roman, 11 point.
• Do not insert extra line breaks between paragraphs.
• Please do a spell check before submitting the report.
• If you want to separate out points, start out each line with a bullet (you can find this in the toolbar of Microsoft Word), not a hyphen.

Ads (instructions for anyone accepting an ad from a sponsor to give to them):
Any ads submitted by sponsors for inclusion in the newsletter must meet the following criteria:

• they can be in pdf format with all fonts embedded in the document
• they can be an image format like a tiff or jpeg
• give them instructions on how to download an example newsletter from our web site, so they can see what size ad we are talking about (what size a ¼ page ad looks like, what size an 1/8 page ad looks like, etc.)
• if they give me something that can’t possibly fit into the space that they are asking for, they will be charged for the next size space up (they tell me that they want ¼ page ad, but the ad that they submit has so much information in it that it can’t possibly fit in less than ½ page).
• if they submit an ad with text along with graphics (like a Microsoft word document):
• they should submit the original graphics along with the word document (if I pull the embedded graphics out of the word document, their quality will be low).
• they will be charged an additional one time setup up fee of $25 (payable to me or whoever has to take the time to format their ad – if I am going to act as their ad department graphics person, they can pay me for my time).

ADA Delegate, NJDA Delegate reports
If you are submitting information from a report that someone else typed up, please reformat it according to the guidelines above for submission of reports for the minutes.

President's Message
As per the above, you should download a copy of a previous newsletter and make sure your message fits into the allotted space. If you want to run over significantly because you have a lot to say, that's fine. Just let me know.