History Commons: Entries for "Dummies"

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Okay, you're new to the History Commons, you've written an entry or two, or five or ten, and you're ready to start publishing. Excellent! But you hit that forbidding entry screen and suddenly your tail droops just a little lower. What the heck? you ask yourself.

Well, it's okay. Let's step through this one bit at the time, and you'll see that it's easier than falling off a ... okay, I'm lying, it's not that easy. But it can be done, and with a (relative) minimum of work.

Note: This walkthrough and help guide is based in large part on the History Commons Style Manual. The manual is packed with information, including much I did not reproduce here. You might keep it open as you peruse this page. It also includes material based on Kevin's Inputting Entries for Newbies post on our blog, and on my own personal experiences with getting things right and, more often, getting them wrong and having to fix them.

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Getting In to the System

First off, you have to edit your user profile to allow you access to the timelines (timelines, projects, at the moment the terms are functionally interchangeable, though we need to correct that) you'll be working in. Log in and access your user profile by clicking on the "My Profile" link in the right-hand sidebar. Then click "Edit Profile." Do a little scrolling, and you get to this screen:

This is my project listing, and yes, I'm a member of all of them. I'm an admin, so I need to be able to play in these projects. (In reality, I work in about half of them.) You're welcome to choose as many projects as you like, but you can only add and edit from projects you belong to.

While you're in this screen, set the "Max entries to edit per month" to 99. As with those things they sell on infomercials at 3 a.m., just set it and forget it.

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Adding an Entry

Once you're registered to work in to some timelines/projects, you can go into one and choose the Add Entry option.

Here's what it looks like from my computer, with a little trimming and shrinking to fit the page a little better:

Like most things, I find the best way to deal with this is to prepare ahead of time as much as possible. So I write my entries beforehand, including dates, headers, source listings, internal link codes (we'll get to that), and so forth. (I use a text editor, EditPad Lite, just because writing in Word adds tons of behind-the-scenes formatting, but if you're comfortable in Word or OpenOffice, go for it.) Here's a dummy entry, laid out the way I write them. Open up an empty "Add Event" screen in a timeline, doesn't matter which one, and follow along. Here's a jaunty little fake entry to give us some context.

(Note: We're not publishing anything during this little walkthrough. Be careful NOT to hit Submit or Save as Draft.)

If you're a minigrant recipient and you clicked on any of the news article links, you have to give the money back. :) There isn't a periwinkle field behind the White House, either. Not sure about the video arcade.

Actually, embedded in this silly little faux entry are examples of most (not all, but close) of the things you'll deal with on a regular basis as you write and post entries. Let's take it from the top.

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Formatting

A lot of what I'm writing is in the History Commons Style Manual. It's not a fun read by any stretch, but it's all in there. You might have it open for reference as we go through the process.

The Date: Straightforward enough. You'll see the date box on the top left of the entry screen. Cut and paste it in. For now, you can ignore the "Actual Date if Needed" field.

Remember, the date you use is when the event occurred, not the date it was reported.

As noted, dates are not always accurate. While you should be as accurate as possible, you might have one of these variants:

or something even odder:

Be as specific as you can, but as I said, sometimes you just can't pin down a particular event that specifically.

On the other hand, there are rare occasions where the time of day is important. Don't list it unless it's pertinent to the entry:

There is also a way to indicate approximate dates, with parentheses, like so:

The database understands the parentheses and inserts the entry in the proper place in the timeline.

No abbreviations for months. Just write 'em out.

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The Internal Link. You have two choices here: change it or leave it alone. I left it alone for hundreds of entries, until Paul Thompson finally convinced me to start writing my own links. In the sample I'm in, the default link for the entry is

because I happened to go into the US International Relations timeline. This is an example of a link that the system automatically generates for a new entry every time you open a new Add Entry screen. Here's why we like to change these automatic links to something else:

This is the actual link generated when I just now opened an empty screen in the Prisoner Abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Elsewhere timeline. Gah, it's huge and unwieldy. And when you want to use the link from that entry in another entry, you'll find yourself having to write something like:

Rewrite it. There are enough of those around as it is without adding new ones to the system.

There is no one particularly recommended method of writing internal links. This is the official style manual methodology: just abbreviating the title. For example:

becomes

The primary reason for doing this is simplicity and identity: each internal link MUST be unique. It's unlikely that such a text string as "BuenosAiresWaterUtilPrivatizd" is going to be mimicked in a later entry.

For purposes of completion, this is another method that some contributors use. Caveat: Derek, the site's founder and executive director, doesn't recommend this method. I'll put it in here because it's often used (by me, among other contributors), and because Kevin already mentioned it, but it's not the best way to do it. Start with the letter a, then the digitized date, i.e. 040108, plus a word or two to help identify and set off the entry, i.e. aprilfool. So we get for this dummy entry:

as our internal link. Then you could write in a later entry:

When you delete the automatically generated link, make sure it's all gone. Sometimes you just get what's visible in the field, not the rest of it that's cleverly hiding past the field. Then you paste in your link but all unknowingly end up with something like:

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The Title. Paste your title over the [Title] placeholder text. Don't use double quotes in titles. Use single quotes if you're quoting someone in the title.

What else? Capitalize everything except articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (between, over, around). Check the manual for more ticky guidelines about capitalizing titles. No punctuation except colons, semicolons, and single quotes.

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The text field: It's big, huh? But it starts so simply. This is what you see:

First off, leave the ------ right where it is. The system won't like it if you remove it. But do get rid of the Write a summary of the event here. You must provide at least one source. phrase. Copy and paste your entry in this box, from the first word to the last source. Paste it above that ====== line. The field will accept the entire entry, and then some.

Styling: You can also see examples of bullet lists and underlined headers. You probably figured out already that ---*--- gives you a bullet link, ---Phrase to be made into a heading--- gives you an underlined heading, and two single quotes: ''word to be emphasized'' gives you italics. One of the most frequently used is the ------ , which most often comes into play like this:

The source listing demands the ------ once a source appears. Note: it's six dashes. Not five, not seven. Six.

Here's a little visual reminder.

There are other formatting choices besides italics, bullet lists, and headings, but we rarely use them. Find out more in the Syntax tab (see below to find that tab).

Note: Those seven icons above the text field:

might be useful if you write your entries in the text field. My recommendation: don't do it. Get used to writing entries in your text editor or MS Word or whatever. But just for the sake of completeness, they mean, in order:

• Italics
• Start new text block
• Start new text block with header
• Start new text block with bullet list
• Add citation
• Add citation with page number
• Link to another event, or entry (what I call an internal link)

There we are. Now don't use them.

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Entities

These are the people, places, organizations, businesses, and what have you mentioned in the course of your story. They go below the ======. You have two options: go through the system's Add New Entity and Search process, or make your own entity listing and be prepared to add and search anyway. I gave you an example of how I do it. But I've done a few kazillion entries before, and I know a few things: for example, the system will kick back

because the VP is listed as

You won't know that until the system kicks back a few of your attempts to enter Cheney as an entity. Then you'll grumble and write it down somewhere for later use. (I have a million little text files with all kinds of info in them. I've forgotten what's in half of the files, and have to check periodically to see what they contain. Make a folder titled "History Commons" or something equally definitive and keep your stuff in there. You will eventually have subfolders, oh yes. Did I mention keeping a copy of every entry you submit?)

Anyway, entities. This is the way you'll probably end up doing them, but if you don't feel comfortable doing it that way at the outset (and you likely won't), then here's the "easier" way -- easier how, I'm not sure, except the system will do some of the work for you.

Here's a shot of the entity creation screen:

See those five tabs -- Text, Entities, Categories, Topics and Countries, and Syntax? Okay, four for you because you don't have the Categories tab yet. You will after you get some entries under your belt. The Entities tab is highlighted, so we're in the Entities portion of the entry screen. You're concerned with three things: the "Search Text" field, the "Add new entity" text link, and the "Perform Search" button. For some reason, the Search Text field and the accompanying Perform Search button are not side by side, though they work together. Let's say you want to add His Nibs to an entry. Type it in:

You'll click the Perform Search button and get these results:

The first one is what you want. See how it shows up as Richard ("Dick") Cheney? Told ya. (We don't do the "unnamed official" stuff any more.) Just click the Add link and it automatically gets inserted into your text field below the ====== line. Use the tab to go back to the main text screen. Here's what you get:

Boo yah.

Side notes: You don't get the spiffy, begging-to-be-misused "Automatically approve myself" checkbox. I have it because I have some admin status, but I don't use it except in very rare and specific instances. To use it would circumvent the peer review process, and that isn't what we do. Also, there's a dropdown menu called "Entity type." I never use it, so I can't tell you what it's good for.

But why go through all of this? Here's why:

This sample doesn't have Cheney in it, but it illustrates the concept nevertheless. Each entity in this listing -- Robert Mueller, Coleen Rowley, Charles Schumer, FBI, Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, Jeff Sessions, Arlen Specter -- is a clickable link that, once clicked, takes you to a list of all the entries featuring that person, or organization, or whatever. Feel like skimming over all things Robert Mueller? Click his link and off you go.

Side note: What's that timeline tag? You don't always see it; it depends on how exactly you get to an entry. Don't ask. Some entries belong to more than one timeline. If you write an entry that you think should go into two or three timelines, e-mail me or someone with access, and we'll cross-post it for you.

When you create a new entity, you get the Create Entity screen:

Just make sure that everything is spelled correctly, and that if it's a business, you don't identify it as a person, and so forth. By the way, in this example, the system told me that there is a similar entity already in the system: Gregory Newbold. It's the same guy, so I didn't submit this entity. That would have been a duplicate, and we don't like duplicate entities. (You won't get the "Automatically approve myself" option just yet. Sorry.)

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Categories: You can't get to the Categories tab until you've posted, I believe, 50 entries in a particular timeline. But when you're able to get into this tab, you'll see a variety of possible categories. Each timeline has different categories, of course. Here's an example from the Domestic Propaganda timeline. I picked it because it's an easy one:

Click the ones you feel are appropriate to your entry. Feeling frisky? Go check out the category list in the Complete 9/11 Timeline (they're visible in the right-hand sidebar). It's quite lengthy and detailed.

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Topics and Countries: The system requires you to choose some appropriate topics and countries. Here's a random screenshot of part of those two screens (they appear together, in a two-column display):

Scroll down and pick the ones you feel are appropriate. If you're not sure, e-mail one of us.

Side note: This two-in-one screen has to do with a secondary organizational facility of the Commons that organizes entries by topic and country. Click into Timelines and click that second, or middle, "Topic" tab and you get this screen:

Not much to look at, huh? Well, click on either "Expand all" or one of the + icons beside Regions or Topics, and one heck of a list appears on your screen. Prepare to be amazed. You don't have to worry about populating these, the system handles all of this itself. But these listings are why you are careful to pick the proper topics and countries for your entries.

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Syntax: Strictly a help function. You'll get some mileage out of this at the beginning, particularly. But I'll leave this to you to peruse on your own. We're going to cover some of the material in this screen later on anyway.

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Preview: Hit Preview before you do anything else. This will show you what your entry will look like, and will catch some errors, mostly in the entities.

Let's see our periwinkle entry in Preview. I'm doing this strictly for tutorial purposes; this entry will not, repeat not, be gracing the pages of the Commons any time soon. Hmmm ... let's put it in US International Relations, why not:

Here's the bottom of the entry, with the entities:

Did you see that the entry identifies the reporter as Jeff Gannon, but in the entity list he's James Guckert? That's because Guckert is Gannon's real name. When I entered him, I used the "Alias" field to also list him as Jeff Gannon. (I have a ton of entries on Gannon/Guckert that haven't been posted yet, just so you know if you do a search.)

See that Bad_link: complete_911_timeline_543 notation in red? That's because I made that link up for the purposes of this demonstration. If it were a real link, it would have appeared as a clickable link, with a date visible and the title of the entry visible on hover.

Side notes: Like before, you guys won't get the spiffy "Automatically approve myself" option. And did you see the category listing is "NATO?" Random, entirely random, unless of course Bush was performing the NATO Shuffle for his admirers.

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Submit or Save as Draft? There are multiple levels of submissions before your new entry finally gets published. Roughly, it goes:

Save as Draft >> Submit >> Content Edit >> Copy Edit >> Manager's Queue >> Publication.

Until you become an editor (the next step up the ladder), you won't be able to see entries once they're in Content Edit or above. This is the heart of our "peer review" process. Editors for the Commons -- Derek, Paul, Kevin, Matt, me, a couple of others -- look over the submitted entries, mostly for content. If everything looks good, the entry goes to the next level, where someone else looks it over, mostly for compliance with the style manual. If there's a perceived problem, the entry is rejected, which sounds awful. Really, all it means is that there's a change that needs to be made, so the entry is sent back into Draft for you to fix. Get used to it now: you will have entries rejected. We all have entries rejected. As I write this, in early December 2008, I have eight entries sitting in draft, rejected by one editor or another, waiting for me to fix them. Wanna see some?

And there are more underneath. One entry I retitled NULL. That one has been superseded and can be overwritten. (Which reminds me: we always overwrite entries. We never delete them. Say it again: We never delete entries. Don't ask me why, Derek and the database folks can tell you more if you're interested.) The red hand with the rudely pointing finger indicates a "rejected" status. The yellow balloons contain comments from whoever sent your entry back into the queue. Hover your mouse over them to read what the editor or admin said -- you'll see why the entry was rejected, and usually will get suggestions as to making corrections. If you can think of a better phrase than "rejected," let me know.

Anyhow, I'd recommend saving everything as drafts to begin with. We can see your drafts, comment on them, and push them through. Once you "Submit" them, you can't see them again unless one of us rejects them. As long as your entries are in draft, you can tinker with them.

Side notes: In the entry screenshot at the top of the page, see the box marked "Drafts of this entry can be viewed and edited by other project members." Always, always leave this box checked. Usually it's checked by default, but not always, so check to make sure. And, you won't get the "Automatically approve myself" option here, either.... Also, we consider entries communal "property," and as such, anyone is free to edit or add to them. And we do, often.

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Sources

Remember in the periwinkle entry, we had three sources, all of which looked like this:

Basically, you've got the publisher, the title of the article, the date of publication, the author(s), and the URL. (Notice the way the multiple authors are listed? Name + name. The system prefers the plus sign.)

In your entry, you used

to stand for the source. You are going to create a "source ID" for this source, one which can be used over and over again. When you submit the entry (or save it as a draft), the system does not just accept your entry. First, it kicks out a pop-up window that asks for source information for the various sources you've used. Let's take a look. I'm going to have to submit a real entry with a real source for this demonstration, because the system won't let me cancel a source without some database ramifications that I want to avoid. Therefore there will be no periwinkle foolishness for the immediate future. This is from a real BBC news article:

You have X remaining sources left: In this instance, I have three sources to add. In reality, I only have two, because one of the sources gets used twice. A nice check to see how many more of the things you have to add before you can be done and go do something else, like pet a cat or watch the ball game.

Option 1: Lets me check if this source is already in the system. Check the dropdown menu. If your title is listed, just select it and choose "Preview this source." It populates the field and you can simply go down, click "Next" (or "Use this source" if there are no more sources to add), and move on. In this case, I didn't use this option.

Option 2: Here you get to search the database for the title of the entry. If it's in there, it will appear in a big gray box on the right. You can click "Preview this source" in the big gray box, and once that's done, follow the same steps as above. In this case, I didn't use this option, either.

Option 3: Now you get to create a source for yourself. Because of the way I formatted this source in the entry field:

the date was already up there. I added the Publication, the Title, and the Url. The BBC rarely lists the authors of their articles, so I left the field blank (fields listed in bold must be populated, otherwise it's optional). Check it over, click Next, and this source is in the system.

This BBC piece was classified as "News article (online OR print)." This is the most common choice, and the system default. But you won't always use just news articles from the Internet. Let's do another (real) entry and show you some more. You have two main categories, Commercial and Government

The system won't let me screenshot the dropdown menu for the various types of sources, but I'll list a few of the ones I use most frequently:

For this entry, the source is a book, Alasdair Roberts's The Collapse of Fortress Bush.

Since it was already in the system, I was able to use Option 1 above and have it appear without re-entering (again, that would create duplicates, and we don't like duplicates). Note the fields in gray: I can't change them. You can see what's required: Author, Date, Title, Publisher, Publisher Location, ISBN, and Page(s) Cited. Of these, I can only add the Page(s) Cited in the bottom field, in white (numbers only: 141, say, or 141-143, or 141, 325). The "Use this source" button is below, out of the screenshot. Click and go.

When you go back into the entry, say to correct an error, you'll see the source with a system-generated ID number, like so:

The 141 in the middle of the string is Page 141. So, you can copy this into a text file for later use. If you create another entry from, say, Pages 235-237, just change it and paste it in:

Easy. (Remember, the system has to generate the ID. It strikes me that some enterprising soul with a taste for cutting corners might decide to just write an ID for themselves and avoid the whole mess. It won't work.)

Some of the other source entry fields -- court and Congressional documents, journal articles, others -- are quite complicated. If you have any trouble entering sources, let me or one of the others know and we can walk you through submitting the source.

Once you submit that final source, you are done. The entry goes into the system, popping up in the timeline in all of its glory. Here's an entry similar to what you'll see:

That ugly diagonal "Draft" in gray stencil shows that the entry is in draft. People who aren't logged in as contributors (or editors, or admins) can't see this draft at all. But you know it's there, and so do we. It will eventually get posted, and you can bask in all the glory of a job well done.

What's those four icons in the top right corner? The only one you'll use regularly is the first one, the pencil and paper icon. Clicking that allows you to edit the entry again. The others are as follows: "Show History" (useful in certain situations), "Add, move, or copy event" (you won't do this for now), and "Delete event" (never, ever click this!).

Multiple Sources: We don't require that entries have multiple sources. Sometimes it's impossible to find more than one, and sometimes the entry just isn't significant enough to require such sourcing. But when you can find more than one source for a particular event, we urge you to use them. Here's an example I wrote just the other day (not yet posted) using two sources, the AP and Reuters. The entry was based on the AP report (because I found it first), and augmented with material from Reuters. That material is highlighted in italics:

You can see how I slotted in the Reuters material. Since I didn't just ram a solid chunk of material into the article, but sprinkled the two quotes into the larger body of the story (with some rewriting to make the entry flow as one piece), I just stuck both sources at the end of the entry.

I don't have to tell you that using multiple sources gives a fuller, more complete picture of an event. And I'm aware that this subject is more to do with content than with formatting, but, well, yeah.

Congratulations, you've just created a properly formatted entry!

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Content

You know how to create and format an entry, but can you write one that won't get edited to death? (Shouts from the other admins: "Well, Max, judging from the amount of entries you've had rejected, neither can you." Yeah, yeah.)

Let's go back to the periwinkle entry. There are some things in it worth a second look.

I've cut out the entities and sources because we aren't focusing on them right now. Instead, let's look at the writing itself. First, some basics.

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Verb Tenses. We operate mostly in the present tense. Entries are written to reflect the date at which they took place. Since Bush went tripping and stumbling through the periwinkle field on April 1, and the entry reflects the events of that particular day, the entry is written as if it is happening now. If it references past events, say:

You'll get used to writing in future tense, especially when you quote someone who wrote an article after the event. In the periwinkle entry, Corn wrote his article on April 24, over three weeks after Bush tripped the light fantastic. So when we quote Corn, we do so using the future tense:

If the date spans a longer period of time, you can get away with using the present tense for quotes and events that happen throughout that time period. For example, let's say I write an entry about six days of legislative hearings in Congress. The entry covers the dates of those six days. Anything that happens during that time span can be written in present tense. Like so:

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Inserting Internal Links. Did we cover that transcendant moment on the bridge? Then find that entry -- you will get very used to searching for entries and copying their links -- and link it:

Put the internal link inside a set of parentheses, with the word "see," and insert the whole thing before the punctuation -- before the period, in this case.

By the way, when you find that April 2003 entry about Bush breakdancing in Brooklyn, you'll notice the words "copy link" beside the title:

Click it. It will copy the link onto your Clipboard, where you can just paste it straight into your text file. When I write entries, I leave placeholders like this:

This way I can just keep writing and find the link later. When I do find the link, I just copy and paste it over the words INTERNAL LINK before I copy the entry into the text field for submission. And if I forget, the system will kindly gakk on the wording and remind me to put a properly formatted link in between those brackets.

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Neutral Language. Notice the lack of perjorative wording:

I didn't write "... dances like a fool ..." or "clownishly dances" because that's a value judgment. He probably did look like a fool or a clown, but we don't pass judgment on anything in our language.

Let's say that again, with emphasis. We don't pass judgment on anything in our language. That will get your writing rejected faster than just about anything. We don't do partisanship. We don't do advocacy. We don't do the thinking for our readers. Save that for blog entries on the Daily Kos or Powerline or whatever. Seriously.

So we let the participants and pundits do it for us. We use descriptive phrases from Bush's press secretary, including the rather ludicrous praise for Bush's "uncanny sense of rhythm." Then we add some perspective, in this case from Democrats who found Bush's get-down moment ridiculous. Steny Hoyer, doing his best imitation of a stuffed shirt, huffed about leadership and a fun little reference to Bush's "underground treehouse," so that goes in. Then we include an "alternative view" from journalist David Corn, whom we identify as a "progressive pundit" in the interest of transparency. Corn believes Bush whiled away the day playing his Game Boy rather than performing whatever arcane, faintly sinister "Seven Days in May" tasks a president performs in the underground bunker. Corn is a reliable Washington insider, and he bolsters his speculation with assertions about Hastert and Rumsfeld joining Bush to play "Halo 3." So we put that in there. Whatever overall impression this entry leaves is painted by the pundits and participants, NOT by us.

Same with using words that describe how a person said something. If your entries have Republicans "insisting," "claiming," "asserting," (or worse, "whining," "squealing," "blabbering," and other extremely loaded words) while those statesmanlike Democrats always "state" or "say," then you're slanting your writing. Try to be evenhanded. If a reporter or author writes that "Pelosi gibbered through yet another legislative session," then you can quote it, but there should be a reason why you choose that particular description that paints Pelosi as a gibbering idiot. And what news outlet are you using, anyway?

Now, take another look at the entry. There are at least two things that I might correct as potentially judgmental in the entry. Bonus points if you can find them:

(Insert "Jeopardy" theme music here.)

Found them? Let's see. First, I used a value judgment term in describing Laura Bush's own dance moves:

"Decorously?" How do I know? Was I there? I don't know, for all I know she was taking liberties with Secret Service agents there in the wildflowers. (Highly doubtful, but there you go.) So I should lose the term, or better yet, find a description to back it. Since this is a make-believe entry, I'll make up a quote from La Perino:

Better. (We could probably argue the concept of the "impromptu" dance move, but if the news article indicated that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, then we could live with "impromptu.")

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Fair and Balanced Coverage -- Seriously. The second? Well, notice that outside of the White House's mouthpiece, I never quoted anyone sympathetic to Bush's episode of Dance Fever. Not one Republican heard from outside the White House. Fortunately, Minority Leader John Boehner just happened to chime in:

Now we have to add Boehner to your entity list, but we've now covered your bipartisan bases. It is not always necessary to get all sides represented in a particular entry, but we do it when we can. And you know, most of the time, the guys on the "wrong" side of the issue, whatever that may be, will hang themselves with their own words. We always go for that.

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Active and Passive Voice. For some reason, people think that writing in passive voice conveys a sense of impartiality and fairness. No, it doesn't. It conveys a refusal to take responsibility for an action and a sense of being dead. No one wants zombie entries slogging around the timelines of the Commons, muttering about "brains, must have brains" as they shamble through the pages, dropping pieces of themselves and generally mucking up the place. Avoid the passive voice when you can. Let's compare:

Bleah. Let's just suck the life out of it, shall we? This is fractionally better:

Better, in the sense that it's better to be beaten with a tree branch than shot with a pistol. We could avoid the whole issue and be direct:

Or even better:

That's it, a strong action verb powering the sentence. Much better. Unlike the earlier ones, this sentence fairly crackles with energy.

(Want to talk about flipping sentences so that the direct object comes before the subject? Active verbs and passive verbs? Receivers of action preceding performers of action? We can, but not here. And you, the smart guy in the back, if you do a search of my entries, you'll no doubt find egregious examples of my writing stumbling along from one passive construction to the next. I know it already. I am doing penance for my sins, so let it be.)

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The Inverted Pyramid. Everyone who took Journalism 101 knows this one. Here's an illustration for those who rearranged their schedules to take Pottery 1A instead:

(I got this image from the Public Affairs Office page of the Delaware National Guard. Thanks, guys. The whole page is a good read for those who didn't sign up for that journalism course. Much of it is applicable to what we do.)

What this means is that, like a good news reporter (a vanishing breed), we lead off with the most important details first. The 5 W's -- who, what, where, when, why, and that pesky H, how, that sneaks in there -- must be covered as soon as possible. Who got charged? Who charged him? Where did it happen? When? (That's covered by the date.) Why were charges brought? How did it occur? Answer these questions first. The more important the information, the more towards the beginning it should be. And we strive for short, punchy entries, so if it's not important, leave it out.

We don't write feature articles:

Sorry, no can do. That doesn't mean we don't cover personal reactions and such when they can be documented. After the lead sentence or two (or three, or whatever) covers the major events, we can document such:

We let the observers supply the more lurid language and descriptions.

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Break It Up. We don't cover multiple events in one entry. One event, one entry. If you're like me, you will get one entry after another rejected, and be told over and over again, "Break it up. Make two (or three, or five) entries out of this one. Spin this section off. Take this out. Sprinkle the information in this entry among these other entries." I'm terrible for writing what Derek calls "thesis" entries -- of the eight entries I have sitting rejected as I type this, three are in there for being too long and unfocused, or rather focused on too many topics. Try to avoid these. But again, if you're like me, you'll do it anyway, and you'll get your entries rejected. It's gonna happen. Don't worry about it, we don't tote up rejections (hmm, Max has 347 entries rejected and Kevin only has 29, guess we'll just have to sink Max into the swamp). Just learn from the rejections.

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Paraphrasing. We are not Xerox machines. We do not, repeat not, cut and paste large chunks of news articles, or retype swaths of paragraphs from books and journal articles, into our work. Unless we're quoting, we're paraphrasing, and editing, and cutting, and editing, and rewriting, and cutting, and editing.... Quoting an official or an observer -- a president, a senator, an eyewitness, a pundit -- is fine. Quoting a reporter from his or her article is a rarity. I've done it, and I will do it again, but only when I feel it is unavoidable.

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Punctuation. Ugh. This can be irksome. Let's again look for help, in the bone-dry but eminently complete History Commons Style Manual. This is a terrific reference, not exactly written to generate excitement, but nevertheless, one worth having at hand at all times. In all cases, the manual goes into detail that I do not, particularly about plain old grammatical conventions. I'm sticking to what we do as opposed to revisiting Mrs. Abercrombie and her diagrammed sentences.

Acronyms and Abbreviations: We use them all the time. In general, we don't use periods inside those acronyms. So "United States" will abbreviate to US, and the Central Intelligence Agency will become the CIA acronym. No periods, unless you use the acronym or abbreviation at the end of a sentence, in which case the period comes anyway.

Italics. You already know how to make a word or phrase italicized -- by surrounding it with two single quotation marks. Like so, if your memory is as bad as mine:

The next question is, when? Well, we never use italics to emphasize anything we write ourselves. That's adding value judgments -- "look at me, I'm important!" Let the reader make that judgment. We will, of course, use italics when someone else uses them in a passage we're quoting. We also use them for, among other things, books, film titles, musical albums, newspapers (we don't always do this, but we should, so you should start off doing it right), TV shows, court cases, the names of ships and naval vessels, computer games, and the like. Shorter and smaller titles, say those of newspaper articles, songs, and so forth, get stuck with quotation marks. Like so:

which, when published, looks like:

Brackets. We get a lot of mileage out of single brackets:

Mostly we use single brackets within quoted passages. Like so, from the bogus David Corn quote from the bogus periwinkle entry that I'm sure has had all the amusement long since drain away:

It's apparent that Corn actually wrote, " ... Dennis Hastert used to join Bush and Rumsfeld down there for a hot afternoon of Halo 3 [a popular video game]." But for the purposes of this entry, we need to remember that some of the readers won't instantly identify Hastert as the former Speaker of the House, and might not remember that Rumsfeld used to be the Secretary of Defense. So we give them the info. In general, err on the side of caution and identify everyone, at least off the bat. Once you've identified the person, you're safe to just refer to him or her by last name only from there on out in that entry.

You also will, at times, need to change the verb tense of a quote inside a sentence to conform with the (usually present) tense of what you wrote. The style manual gives the following apt, if disturbing, example:

Side note: Don't use double brackets, ever, in styling your entries. The double [[ ]] brackets tells the database that a data string is coming. If you tease it by giving it double brackets and then don't give it something it can use, it will retaliate. It won't be pretty.

Underscores and Profanity: People curse, yes indeedy they do, and it's our job to report their words accurately. It's also in our interest not to get filtered by overly puritanical or aggressive browser filters and sniffers. So we split the difference. We use underscores to replace the vowels in those words that make your Aunt Prudence run shrieking for the bedroom. So, with the help of an apt quote from comedian George Carlin, let's give another illustration that I, at least, find less unsettling than the one just above:

And I'm forced to agree with George: the last word doesn't even belong on the list.

Colons: Like the bracket, we get a good bit of mileage out of the colon, too. If you know your grammar, you know it introduces a list: The president sent me to the store to buy: pretzels, beer, pickles, batteries for his remote control, and the latest copy of Penthouse. But we also use the colon to introduce a quote with more than one sentence (this one was a particular bugaboo of mine before Kevin finally helped me get it through my head, so hat tip to Kevin for this one): Bush tells reporters: "Naw, I did it. Danced across the lawn. Danced like it was 1999. Sure did. Had fun."

Ellipses: We all know that the ellipsis (ellipses when they travel in packs) is the three dots ... that stand in place of omitted material in a sentence. We cut down as much as is feasible, and that often means cutting down quotes and passages. In those cases, we use the ellipsis.

[to be continued]

Useful Links

• History Commons Style Manual
• History Commons Blog (news and annoucements about the Commons
• History Commons Group Blog (where the community discusses events featured in the Commons, issues affecting users and contributors, and whatever else comes to mind)