Authoring Style Guide

As a cooperative effort of the Southern Research Station and Southern Forestry Extension, unless specifically addressed in this author help section of forest encyclopedia network (FEN), we are using the author guidelines as published by the Southern Research Station.  Authoring content for FEN is similar to authoring for most scientific journals such as the Journal of Forestry. However, there are significant differences between print journals and hypertext that must be understood in order to produce good contributions.

As with all good writing, the author should start with a very clear organization of the material in mind. it is best to start the authoring process by developing an outline because it represents the structure or skeleton of a hypertext contribution. The hypertext structure consists of major headings which are referred to as "organizational pages" or "parent pages." Sub-headings below organizational or parent pages identify "child pages", or more specific topics falling under more general topics. Here is an example of a hypertext outline consisting of parent and child pages:

• Section Organization Page (the parent page of the new contribution)
  • Sub-section A (the first child page)
  • Sub-section B (the second child page)
  • Sub-section C (the third child page)

This structure may be thought of as the "basic organizational unit". When its time to develop sub-sub-sections, simply replicate this basic unit, as for example:

• Sub-Section A Organization Page (the parent page of the new contribution)
  • Sub-sub-section A (the first child page)
  • Sub-sub-section B (the second child page)
  • Sub-sub-section C (the third child page)

It is easy to see that you can keep adding sub-sections like this until you reach a page that has no need to have children. This final page is likely to be a "content page". Content pages contain most of the actual knowledge that the author wants to present to the readers. The organizational pages may present higher level knowledge but they also act to tell the reader what a particular section or sub-section contains.

FEN has established a few general rules for the length of a contribution. Authors should try to adhere to these rules, but there are cases when exceptions to the rules are reasonable. Apage should be limited in length to no more than 3 "page-downs". "Page-down" refers to how many times a reader has to hit the "PgDn" (page down) buttonon akeyboard to reach the end of a page. This 3 page-down limit serves to make the entire site more readable and understandable. So, if your page is longer than 3 page-downs, you need tobreak it up intosub-sections or multiple pages. A second key rule limits the number of subsections (children) that any one page should have. A parent page should have at least 2 and no more than 6-8 child pages. This guideline comes from social science research that points to the fact that we humans can only hold about 7 things in our short-term memory. Any more than that and we have trouble quickly understanding things because we have to move some of those items into long-term memory and memorize them which takes a lot of effor and time.