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Sophian Offices Clean-Out Party

When: Saturday, October 18, 1-3 p.m.

Where: Capen Annex

Come help us clean out our offices and improve our workspace! If you enjoy the adventure involved in poking through an old drawer and wondering if the fuzzy ball in the back corner is an old sweatshirt or a dead animal, then join us as we rummage through decades of Sophian history and get covered in cobwebs and dust.

Weekly Suggestions

Here are this week's suggestions:

When writers/photo staff submit photo captions, they MUST provide captions or the appropriate information for us to write a caption.

Don't send any articles in the body of an E-mail.

When Smith students are quoted or mentioned in an article, please add their years as well. Writers should also add their years for their bylines.

Shorter paragraphs please!

Avoid cliches, similes, exclamation points, and contradictions.

Production Note

On Election Day (Tuesday, November 4), we will not be working on the Sophian. Instead, that week, we will try to get as much work done on Monday as we can, and then finish production on Wednesday morning.

Weekly Suggestions

Every week, while we are doing final proofreading on the Sophian in the early hours of the morning, the Associate Editors and I make a list of various style errors and suggestions that we notice often in articles. These comments are then talked about at our weekly staff meeting, but starting this week, you'll be able to read them on this blog.

• Use shorter paragraphs
• Don't use exclamation points!
• Avoid "cutesy" writing (if you're using exclamation points, you have probably crossed into the realm of "cutesy.")
• Avoid slang
• Don't say "in my opinion"- this should definitely NEVER happen in a News article, but it shouldn't appear in an Opinions article either. If you just state your point, without saying "I think" or "in my opinion" or (God forbid) "I feel," it sounds a lot more convincing.

Check back next week for more tips!

Anna Newman, Editor-in-Chief

The future of newspapers?

This Newsweek article explores the technology of e-newspapers and how devices like the Kindle are slowly transforming our written world.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/157580

Sleater-Kinney Video

To anyone who read Pop Rocks and Coke the week it focused on Sleater-Kinney and the rise of riotgrrrl, video footage of the Mexico City performance of "Rockin' in the Free World" with Pearl Jam (and wrestling masks) can be found here. A link to the original article is here.