The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc.
Bulletin Editors Manual
Second Edition 1993Editor’s Note: Literary purists among us may find this manual appalling. They may be offended at my breezy approach to grammar, style and punctuation. (I hope the spelling is okay.) My intention is to help bulletin editors with what is written, not how it is written.
So if this manual is a bit slangy; a bit irreverent of pure grammatical form; sometimes over- (or under-) punctuated, let it be. The intent is to be cheerfully informative, not ponderously correct.
Layout and Reproduction judges may not care much for the page layouts in here, especially those bottom margins of varying size. There are several reasons for them. One reason is to provide space for written notes. The other reasons are the editor’s private business.
Editors, do not take this manual for a role model. Just open the pages, stick in your thumb, pull out a plum and say, “Hey, I can use that!”
The previous issue of the Bulletin Editors Manual was released in 1981, a year when the IBM Selectric typewriter was still leading-edge technology and only a handful of avant garde editors were venturing into the new world of computers. The 1981 Manual spoke of gelatin and fluid (spirit) duplicators and mimeograph machines, and noted that photocopy machines are too expensive for chapters to own, and reproductions from them are more costly than from other methods.
Without belaboring the point, it’s clearly time for a new model of the Bulletin Editors Manual. Although the age of computers has most certainly arrived, this issue recognizes that many editors and editors-to-be still have the old Smith-Corona, Royal or Underwood manual typewriter on the desk, and have no desire to change. Hence, it still addresses the time- honored methods they might use to assemble a bulletin for print.
Tools and techniques for editors with a computer on their desk will be discussed, but not in detail. Present-day software for word processing and desk top publishing is too diverse—it changes almost daily—to be covered in a manual like this.
All editors and editors-to-be, however, may benefit from discussions herein of production techniques. They come from the accumulated knowledge of some of the Society’s finest editors.
| Part 1 | |
| Why Chapter Bulletins? | |
| Part 2 | |
| Who's a Bulletin Editor? | |
| Part 3 | |
| Where Does All That News Come From? | |
| Points For Editors To Consider | |
| What's An Editorial? | |
| Part 4 | |
| How Does All That News Get On the Pages? | |
| The Writing Engine | |
| Format: | |
| How Should It Look? | |
| Part 5 | |
| Some Assembly required. | |
| Assembling The Pages | |
| Cut and Paste—For Real. | |
| Part 6 | |
| Tools,Tricks and Gizmos | |
| Part 7 | |
| How Do I Handle Photos? | |
| Part 8 | |
| The Mechanicals Are Done. Now What? | |
| Part 9 | |
| What Do I Do With All These Freshly Printed Bulletins? | |
| Part 10 | |
| Computers: For the Experts, the Not-so-experts and the Hope-to-be Experts. | |
| How Much PC Do You Need? | |
| Let's Talk About Software | |
| What Does An Editor Really Need? | |
| A Brief Word About Printers | |
| A Less-Brief Word About Software: Non-word Processing Software, That Is. | |
| PART 11 | |
| Contests: Do I Have To Put Myself Through That Wringer? |