Guidelines for Contributors

House Style

Digital Web Magazine follows the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition as a guide for proper grammar and general writing style. In addition to the Chicago Manual of Style, there are a few special conventions that we ask our contributors to observe. Implementing these conventions in your submissions will save us a large amount of editing time.

Spelling

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

Special Conventions

Digital Web Magazine - Title case, spelled out completely with no hyphens.

Web - Web should always be capitalized and never joined with another word.

XHTML - XHTML should always be all capital letters, as is the case with any acronym.

email - The word email should always be lower case and contain no hyphen.

Typography

Em-dash - When using an em-dash there should be no leading or following space around the em-dash. To ensure the typography is properly displayed use the special character sequence of — in place of the physical em-dash character.

Tags and Elements - When citing markup or code use the <code></code> tags around your examples.

Double Quotation Marks - When using double quotation marks in your article use the special character sequences of &#8220; for the opening quotation mark and &#8221; for the closing quotation mark.

Single Quotation Marks and Apostrophes - For single quotation marks and apostrophes use &#8216; for the opening quotation mark and &#8217; for the closing quotation mark or apostrophe.