These are a series of guidelines, including Dos and Don'ts for SQLServerCentral authors and prospective authors.

Editing

We will help you edit and give you feedback on the articles, however, we should not be the first person to read the article. Let a friend look it over and give you comments, especially if English is not your native language. We do not have time to heavily edit or rewrite all articles and will return articles without any proofreading to you.

Comments are placed inside the content with the tag "Editor: at the beginning of the line. Look for the comments and address them. Email articles at sqlservercentral dot com if you have questions, or include your own comments in the article and resubmit it with "author: on a line,

We try to review all articles within two weeks, but the time frame varies depending on load. Please feel free to email articles at sqlservercentral dot com for status if you think that we are taking too long.

Formatting

We have a series of styles and formatting options available to you, however these are not necessarily everything you may want. Please use the styles that are available in the editor for most of your work. If you have not published an article, we will not grant exceptions, so stick with that is available.

Titles: Please refrain from repeating the title of your article in the article details. It's printed at the top of the page, and it's something we have to delete.

Subheadings: Use the "Heading 2" and "Heading 3" styles for your subheadings. BOLD should not be used, and a subheading does not need a colon or a hyphen. DO NOT use colors.

Code: We have styles for include code (anything by XML or SQL), and then separate styles for SQL code or XML. Highlight the code and pick the section. This will format your code. If you have a separate message or section, outside of normal code, you can use the blue, green, or red code items, but if you have any doubt, don't. Our formatter will add color coding to most of the code.

If you find an issue with the styles, please let us know.

General Rules

These types of things occur in articles all the time and it's really, really annoying to see them. If you've published less than 5 articles, just follow these rules. After that, ask if you can have an exception.

One "And" - You get one and in a sentence. If you have more than that, or have an "or" or "but", you need two sentences. It's hard to make this read well and most people can't do it.

Ellipsis - The "..." that's popular to create a pause, don't use it. Again, most people can't do it well, so please don't use this construct.

Learn how to use "the", "a", and "an". We see too many articles that seem to ignore the fact that a noun often needs a "the" in front of it if it's specific, or an "a" if it's not. Here's a short tutorial.

Every section needs a paragraph. A subheading and section cannot consist of a list or code. If you don't want to write to describe something, why are you submitting an article? Include a paragraph of at least two sentences that describes what is in your section.

Do not start sentences with "following". We do not accept sentences such as "Following is a query" or "Following are results" . Please use something like "The following query.." or "The following results..."

Other Rules

We'll add more hints as we find them, but these are general rules that you ought to use to check your articles before submitting them.