Editorial Guidelines

These editorial guidelines are designed to help you understand what we accept and don't accept for inclusion in our work database. Before you submit to our site, we'd appreciate if you'd read this page first. LetterRep.com Editorial Guidelines:(CONTENT QUALIFICATIONS) To Be Qualified For Our Site, Your Work: MUST BE AN ORIGINAL WORK THAT YOU WROTE. If you work for a writer as an employee or contractor and are submitting the work, please submit the work as if it was from the original writer including his or her email address and name. MUST NOT CONTAIN AFFILIATE PROGRAM LINKS. See Section #3 below. MUST NOT BE BLATANT AND EXCESSIVE SELF-PROMOTION OR HYPE. MUST NOT CONTAIN PORNOGRAPHY/ADULT MATERIAL, HATE OR VIOLENCE-ORIENTED, SUGGEST RACIAL INTOLERANCE, ADVOCATE AGAINST ANY INDIVIDUAL, HAVE INSULTING-OBSCENE-DEGRADING TONE OR CONTAIN EXCESS PROFANITY. MUST NOT CONTAIN INFORMATION ON: hacking/cracking content, auto-surf program advocacy or promotion, bomb creation, support for terrorism/ radicalism/ religious fanaticism, illicit drugs or drug paraphernalia, steroid use or advocacy, weapon/ firearms/ ammunition/ balisongs/ butterfly knives or brass knuckles, or the promotion of hard alcohol/tobacco-related products or prescription drugs. MUST NOT CONTAIN ANY CONTENT THAT IS A VIOLATION OF ANY LAW, be considered defamatory, libelous, or infringes on the legal rights of others. MUST NOT BE A SUBMISSION OF THE EXACT SAME WORKS as one that you already submitted. Some writers have submitted the same work multiple times with only a few words changed in the body -- we reject these and ban writers who engage in this practice. MUST NOT BE A REPLY TO A PERSONAL EMAIL, letter or other correspondence. LetterRep.com Editorial Guidelines:(LETTER COMPOSITION FIELDS) Letter Title: Letter Writers should enter a description into this field that captures the nature of the letter and answers the requestor's request. DO NOT USE PROPER NAMES IN THE TITLE OF THE LETTERS. Re: The Reference field is optional.  Use in cases where attention needs to be brought to the primary subject of the letter, i.e., 'Re: Regarding Case # 1234,' 'Re: Account ABCD,' etc. Letter Body: For best results, create your letter in an ascii text editor such as Windows Notepad.  Text editors such as these will prevent any formatting characters to enter your work 'behind the scenes' that might make problems for your work later.  Write letters in standard English. LetterRep.com’s Writer’s Stylesheet Put No Addressing, Dating, Re: Or Subject In The Header Of Your Letters Letter Title • Be concise: instead of “announce the sale of a boat or house” write “announce sale of property”; e.g., omit articles when possible and unnecessary description. • Lowercase first word. • Use active verb (not –ing or noun phrase): e.g. Announce (not announcing). • End with a period before author if named. • Do not use punctuation after author other than periods for initials, example: write a letter title. Author A.B. Letter Description • Include only 6-8 lines (salutation and body paragraph, or two if short). • End with 3 dots (including period): .… Insert Material • Be concise. • Do not use verbs in brackets (e.g. [insert amount]; just write $[amount]). • Use brackets [ ] , not parentheses ( ). • Name: [name] or [full name] if necessary (not [person's name] or [subject’s name]) • DO NOT PUT XX OR [XX] • Name of company or organization: [company/organization] (not [business name] or [name of business]) • Add apostrophe-s after brackets: [name]'s or [company]'s. • If a date is used in the body of the letter, insert date as [date]. • Time: insert time as [time] or [time period] • Combinations: on [date] at [time], we... • Position or title: [position/title] (not [state name of position]) • Gender: [his/her], [he/she] • Optional material: [Optional:] Then begin the optional content as a separate paragraph. • Dollars: $[amount] • Contact information: [phone number] or [phone] or [email] •     Letter Body • Business letters: Dear [name]: or To Whom It May Concern: (note colon and caps) • Personal letters: Dear [name], (note comma) • Skip a line before beginning first paragraph. • Double space between paragraphs. • Use the words “from” and “to” rather than a hyphen between times or dates. • Do not use any spacing before paragraphs (LetterRep customers can choose the format from their interface). • Do not add any blank lines at the end of the document •     Display Content • Lowercase first word. • End with period. • Use active verbs: complain about poor service; express disappointment with company. Word Choices  • Avoid "totally" (use "completely" instead) and “definitely.” • Avoid "a lot" (use "many" or a similar word instead). • Due to = caused by (do not use it to mean "because of"). • Avoid contractions in business letters; they are acceptable in personal letters. • Avoid “thanks much.” • Use “I look forward to” rather than “I’m looking forward to.” • Use “and” rather than “&.” • Punctuation  • Use the Writer's Style Sheet below Remove white space at end of document General • Single space throughout. • Proofread the letter before submitting it! Closing: Do Not Put One In 'Sincerely,' is the default Closing for each letter.  Writers are free to put in whatever Closing they feel best suits their work.  If you change the closing to something other than the default, be sure to end it with the appropriate punctuation. Sign up Page Display Content: The Sign Up Page Display Content are six textboxes that give you a chance to describe the letter you wrote.  These should be used as bullets describing the letter, not as different parts of a continuous sentence or paragraph.  While a brief excerpt of the letter is given, we cannot 'give away the farm' by allowing the viewer to see the entire letter.  The Sign Up Page Display Content should tell what the letter does in order to entice the viewer to buy.  This is the writer's opportunity to describe the finer points of the letter to the reader.  Try to market the benefits your letter offers in these six boxes. LetterRep.com Editorial Guidelines:(FORMAT) Editor:  Use an ASCII text editor, such as Microsoft Windows Notepad.  Word processing programs often insert formatting characters 'behind the scenes' that appear later after readers purchase the letter.  In many cases, these characters cannot be removed from the text by the purchaser and the letter requires re-editing.  If a word processor is used to compose the letter, Cut-&-Paste the finished work into an ASCII text editor such as Notepad to remove the formatting characters and then Cut-&-Paste from Notepad into the boxes of the LetterRep.com 'Submit Letter' page. TITLE: Your Title MUST BE IN UPPER AND LOWER CASE LETTERS With The First Letter of Each Major Word Capitalized. If you submit your TITLE in all CAPS, we will change to "Upper and Lower Caps.". It is ok NOT TO CAPITALIZE COMMON WORDS such as "a" - "the" - "to" - "for" etc...unless you want to.  We accept these either way. Please DO NOT PUT QUOTES around your entire TITLE. Do NOT end your TITLE with a period. Refrain from EXCESSIVE REPETITIVE PUNCTUATUION in your TITLE. We DO NOT ALLOW SPACES in your TITLE before you begin your TITLE. In other words, your TITLE should begin with the first word flush to the LEFT of the TITLE submission box. We DO NOT ALLOW YOUR NAME OR ANY WEBSITE URL to be in your TITLE or the BODY of your letter. DO NOT REPEAT YOUR TITLE in the WORK BODY. Your TITLE must not be keyword stuffed (too many redundant keywords used over and over again) WORK BODY: Must be a MINIMUM OF 200 WORDS. For us, an ideal work size is 1000 to 2000 words. Please DO NOT REPEAT YOUR TITLE AND WRITER NAME at the top of the WORK BODY. We will remove it. If you sell hard in the WORK BODY BY INCLUDING YOUR URL or product pitch or blatant self-promotion, we will toss your work without notice. HTML TAGS ARE NOT ALLOWED in the BODY portion of your work. Please do not submit works with excessive HARD LINE BREAKS. A HARD LINE BREAK is when you use the carriage return rather than allowing each line to wrap naturally. We may either REJECT OR CONVERT any works that are sent in with hard line breaks. It's ok to force a hard line break when you're making a small list of items but it's not ok to arbitrarily force hard line returns on every single line at a certain character width. At the very END of your WORK BODY, please help us by removing any EXCESS VERTICAL SPACES that would create or force the creation of additional vertical spaces after the end of your WORK BODY.  USE OF BRACKETS []:  In order to keep letters as general as possible in order to cater to the largest possible audience, we recommend that writers do not use specifics in their letters.  For example, even if the requestor has stated that they need a letter to be sent to a man, we recommend that writers capture different genders inside brackets, such as, [him/her] or [he/she], etc.  If the requestor states that they would like to send a letter to a specific name, for example, '...to Mrs. Jones the human resources director,' we recommend that writers capture the title rather than the name in brackets, such as, [name of human resources director].  LetterRep.com Writer's Stylesheet Put No Addressing, Dating, Re: Or Subject In The Header Of Your Letters Letter Title • Be concise: instead of “announce the sale of a boat or house” write “announce sale of property”; e.g., omit articles when possible and unnecessary description. • Lowercase first word. • Use active verb (not –ing or noun phrase): e.g. Announce (not announcing). • End with a period before author if named. • Do not use punctuation after author other than periods for initials, example: write a letter title. Author A.B. Letter Description • Include only 6-8 lines (salutation and body paragraph, or two if short). • End with 3 dots (including period): .… Insert Material • Be concise. • Do not use verbs in brackets (e.g. [insert amount]; just write $[amount]). • Use brackets [ ] , not parentheses ( ). • Name: [name] or [full name] if necessary (not [person's name] or [subject’s name]) • DO NOT PUT XX OR [XX] • Name of company or organization: [company/organization] (not [business name] or [name of business]) • Add apostrophe-s after brackets: [name]'s or [company]'s. • If a date is used in the body of the letter, insert date as [date]. • Time: insert time as [time] or [time period] • Combinations: on [date] at [time], we... • Position or title: [position/title] (not [state name of position]) • Gender: [his/her], [he/she] • Optional material: [Optional:] Then begin the optional content as a separate paragraph. • Dollars: $[amount] • Contact information: [phone number] or [phone] or [email] Letter Body • Business letters: Dear [name]: or To Whom It May Concern: (note colon and caps) • Personal letters: Dear [name], (note comma) • Skip a line before beginning first paragraph. • Double space between paragraphs. • Use the words “from” and “to” rather than a hyphen between times or dates. • Do not use any spacing before paragraphs (LetterRep customers can choose the format from their interface). • Do not add any blank lines at the end of the document   Display Content • Lowercase first word. • End with period. • Use active verbs: complain about poor service; express disappointment with company. Word Choices  • Avoid "totally" (use "completely" instead) and “definitely.” • Avoid "a lot" (use "many" or a similar word instead). • Due to = caused by (do not use it to mean "because of"). • Avoid contractions in business letters; they are acceptable in personal letters. • Avoid “thanks much.” • Use “I look forward to” rather than “I’m looking forward to.” • Use “and” rather than “&.” Punctuation  • Use a semicolon (;) before “however” and a comma after it. • Use double quotation marks, not single. • Enclose period and comma inside quotation marks. • Use commas after all elements in a series, including last one before “and.” • Use only one space between sentences and following all punctuation. • Use the slash mark (/) for multiple pronoun (or other) options: [his/her] NOT [his or her]. • Follow “To Whom It May Concern” with a colon (:) NOT a semicolon (;). • Do not use tabs; use one space. Remove white space at end of document General • Single space throughout. • Proofread the letter before submitting it! LetterRep.com Editorial Guidelines:(AFFILIATE PROGRAMS) Sorry, we DO NOT ALLOW ANY AFFILIATE (OR DISTRIBUTOR) LINKS in any works. Please don't send them in or your work will be rejected.