Resources e-letter 24:5 - October 2024
The autumn issue of Resources e-letter gives news of the latest set of Training Notes. TN156, Preparing a house-style guide, includes a sample guide to ensure the printed output from your church or mission agency is in a standard format. This is followed by a listing of recent uploads and news of my future.
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NEW: Preparing a house-style guide
An editor’s house-style guide (HSG) is a written agreement or set of rules for how to write text when variations are available. For example, do you write ‘house style’, ‘housestyle’ or ‘house-style’? Do you write ‘e.g.’, ‘eg’ or ‘eg.’?
It may also include issues of which letters to capitalise in a book title or in words such as ‘Bible’ and ‘biblical’ and advice on common misuses of terms such as ‘lay’ and ‘lie’. The point is to offer a common style for all types of printed output from your church or mission agency.
The notes then offer a simple, sample guide covering:
- Spelling and punctuation
- Hyphens
- Abbreviations
- Quotations
- Book titles and church names
- Capitalisation of official groups
- Specific capitalisation
- Numerals, dates and references
- Lists
- Writing to those outside the Church
Training Notes TN156, Preparing a house-style guide, is now available without charge on the Training Notes index page of this website.
Recent uploads to the website
Here is a listing of new resources this past year.
A56 Organising pastoral care – … in an all-member culture
A57 How to work with volunteers – A DIY training aid
TN149 Keep all your seniors in touch
TN150 Prayer at church business meetings
TN151 Loss of leadership passion
TN152 Should a church set ‘targets’?
TN153 How not to manage volunteers!
TN154 Prayer sessions that engage
TN155 The value of the ‘Blob pictures’ tool
And here is the current set of DIY training aids that I plan to add to (see below):
A49 How to read the Bible out loud
A52 How to run a church vision day
A54 How to get a message across
A57 How to work with volunteers
My future
I retire from client work (consultancies and training events) at Christmas when I shall be 75 years old and have completed 50 years in church operations in one way or another. But I plan to continue writing and, in particular, providing outlines of all my training events in print so that anyone can use them in future. Mailings may be less regular than now but I will explain the details in due course.
So, for the moment at least and for as long as my health holds up, I hope to continue this mailing list in announcing new resources as they are uploaded to my website.
Please ensure all these materials are widely promoted in your church. Thank you for your interest.