General Guidelines
Know your audience.
Identify the audience you are trying to reach or nothing you say will reach them.
Focus on one thing.
Emphasize a single message. Include more and your readers will either fail to retain what they have read or stop reading.
Make it personal.
It is important to establish a personal connection in all our communications. Use the second-person “you” and “your” to engage and motivate.
Avoid jargon.
Write clearly and keep your language personable. Jargon has its place, but our communications are not it.
Stay out of the past.
Amazing things are happening at Georgia right now. Use an active voice to tell the world about it.
Give the reader something to do.
Always include a clear call to action.
Choose wisely.
Every communication need not contain every detail. Focus on what is both important and relevant—clutter just gets in the way of our message.
Incorporate some white space.
During reading, the eye needs places to rest, so the reader can digest information and understand the message. Work with a designer to ensure that your content is well organized and makes good use of white space.
Avoid clichés.
It is easy to resort to clichés. At first blush, they sound catchy. But they should be avoided. Use personality to your advantage by being original and engaging.
Do not force excitement.
If the message is not something we would yell, it does not deserve an exclamation point. Use this mark extremely sparingly or, better yet, not at all.
Editorial Headlines
For a News Release
Follow standard headline guidelines. This hed should be a quick way of getting to the point. Headline/subhead combos work great for longer headlines. This headline or hed/subhed combination will appear on the news release disseminated to media and posted on Newswise and, if appropriate, EurekAlert.
Headlines are often used as email subjects.
For UGA Today
These should be a rewritten/shortened version of the news release headline.
Top story: About 50 characters or about 7 words. These need a subhed of no more than 80 characters or 12 words.
Lead story: Up to 65 characters, about 10 or 11 words. This should be the Top Story headline with a couple of words added. The subhead does not appear on the home page unless changed to a different lead story format. This is done when the subhed will add vital information to the main hed.
For the News Panel on the UGA Homepage
Just 2 to 4 words, no more than 25 characters. It can be a label hed.
Columns
Columns staff will use the news release or top story headline and reword it if needed for space.
For feature stories, a headline/dek combo is needed.
When Columns staff are provided headlines that are too long—or too short—for the page layout, the headlines are rewritten to fit.
When pre-approved headlines on stories from certain offices are rewritten for Columns, this information is shared with the appropriate person in the President’s Office.
UGA Today email right rail
These are about 15 characters per line, with 2 or 3 lines. These headlines are written on the spot when building the newsletter using as much of the UGA Today headline as possible.