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Additional guidelines:

• Write for the general public.
• Focus on a particular issue or event in the news.
• Length: 500-750 words.
• Write for print: no links or other markup.
• Support the abolition of the State.

Resources:
The Elements of Style

Random Notes on Style and Grammar:

These are intended as suggestions, not hard and fast rules — but I’ll probably do them for you if you don’t do them for yourself.

Style/grammar/punctuation rules vary from paper to paper.

One reason I’m trying to promulgate a uniform set of such rules within C4SS is so that we have uniformity in “the little things” among all our writers. We should shock and outrage our readers with our arguments, not with wild variations of grammar, spelling and punctuation.

A second reason is ease of proofreading. If there’s a single style criterion, I can proof for it the same way every time — go through an article and I’m done. If I try to accommodate a different set of style rules for every writer, I’ll end up jumping back and forth in every article, trying to remember that writer’s rules to achieve internal, rather than universal, consistency.

So:

• Don’t use the “Oxford comma.” Right: “Peas, carrots and tomatoes.” Wrong: “Peas, carrots, and tomatoes.”
• Capitalize the first word after a colon. Right: “Resolved: That Tom nitpicks.” Wrong: “Resolved: that Tom nitpicks.”
• Put spaces around ellipses. Right: “And then … booga-booga!” Wrong: “And then… booga-booga!”
• Speaking of ellipses, when quoting someone else: If you’re breaking off in the middle of a sentence and picking up later in that same sentence … do it like this. If you’re breaking off at the end of a sentence and picking up later in another sentence. … do it like this. If you’re breaking off in the middle of a sentence and picking up either at the beginning of, or in the middle of, another sentence …. do it like this.
• Use the long dash (two strokes of the hyphen key, with spaces on either side) when using a dash to indicate an interjection (as opposed to hyphenation, which should just use one stroke of the hyphen key with no spaces). Right: “And then — just before he said ‘booga-booga!’ — he said ‘duuuude.'” Wrong: “And then – just before he said ‘booga – booga!’–he said ‘duuuude.'”