Newsletter wars continue

[Paul]

You may remember that my organization publishes a monthly newsletter to which some other organizations contribute material. The other organizations pay a share of the printing and mailing cost and so feel entitled to do whatever they want, including editing one another's copy and vetoing one another's contributions.

Next month's issue has been a particularly painful one, both editorially and typographically. Two of the organizations submitted a joint article full of bad English and, worse, bold type (and some underlining). They also submitted numerous separate announcements with, generally, two or three instances of bold type in each announcement, not counting the run-in head (which is supposed to be bold).

One organization has an employee who doesn't use a period at the end of a sentence if it's also the end of a paragraph

Another has someone who writes dates with misplaced commas:
February, 7 2010 is an example.

One of them set a display ad entirely in French Script, at a size that made it almost completely illegible. Another set its display ad entirely in Poor Richard, including italics and bold italics, but Poor Richard has neither. Maybe you have to upgrade to Rich Richard for those.

Dashes might be hyphens, spaced hyphens, double hyphens, spaced double hyphens, en dashes, spaced en dashes, em dashes, or spaced em dashes. Or all of those in a single paragraph.

One fairly important event is discussed in about six separate articles, plus a full-page ad.

The front cover indicated that the issue was for Febuary. At least that's something I could correct.

I remind myself every month that the committee that hired me did not know that I had any background in newsletter publishing, and that my predecessor wasn't a native speaker of English.