Guidelines

Updated August 11, 2023

Tech Times Fall and Spring Semester schedule is currently active, emails will go out on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday each week. 

If you have any questions about the guidelines or the submission process, let us know at techtimes@tntech.edu.

Note: If you’re having trouble reaching the form, and the page appears to be blank and continually refreshing, you may have encountered an TN Tech account log-in error. Please open the submission form in an incognito window or in a browser in which you have not yet logged into your Tech account. Log in when prompted, and you should be able to access the submission form. If you are still encountering issues, email techtimes@tntech.edu for assistance.

Submission Requirements

  1. Submissions must be in relation to the university and must be submitted for a Tennessee Tech department, office, chartered student organization, or Tech Auxiliary; no advertisements for unaffiliated organizations are accepted.
  2. Only submissions from Tech faculty, staff, and students are accepted and all submissions require signing into their Tennessee Account.
  3. All submissions must include a way for readers to contact someone for more details.
  4. Event submissions must include the following: the name of the sponsoring/hosting organization, date, time, location, contact information, and a brief description.
  5. Submission content is limited to 700 characters, including spaces, new lines, and code.
  6. Submissions can include feature images, but these must be in JPG or PNG format, and should be between 500 and 1500 pixels on any given side. Square and vertical images work best.
  7. Accessibility must be taken into consideration and posts which fail to meet basic accessibility protocols may be rejected.
    1. No image may contain essential information that is not also in the text of the post.
    2. Links or QR codes placed in images must also be included as an actual link in the text of the post.
  8. Duplicate announcements are not allowed within the same semester. The form itself will automatically reject any post with a duplicate title and post content.
  9. If you need to make additional posts on the same subject, you can do so only if the post contains changes. Such as cancellations or time and location changes.
  10. All posts must be submitted before noon in order to be published that day for the following email. Only posts that have been approved and published at the time the Tech Times email edition is built will be included in the email edition. Email editions are built the business day prior to the day email editions are sent.
  11. Posts with a date must be submitted in time for the announcement to appear in the email on the day of or before. If an announcement will not be included in an email in time for the posted date, the announcement will be denied. For more information on how to schedule your posts, see below.

If a post must be scheduled for a specific email edition of Tech Times, consult the guide to scheduling submissions below. It is the responsibility of the submitter to select the date that suits them best.

Tech Times Regulations

  1. Submissions appear on the blog first and then in the email edition.
  2. Submissions run in the email editions only once. Duplicate announcements are not allowed.
  3. Content promoting student registration in academic courses is not allowed.
  4. Campus community members who submit to Tech Times are responsible for the legality, including but not limited to copyright laws, accuracy, timeliness, and reliability of submitted material.
  5. Tech Times blog posts are published the day before the selected email date. The Tech Times email edition runs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 8 AM during the Fall and Spring Semester, and Tuesday and Thursday during the Summer.
  6. The Tech Times email edition is built from published blog posts at 2:00 p.m. the business day before.
  7. The Tech Times email is separated into two categories: “University Notices” and “Reader Submissions”. A post is considered a University Notice when it meets all of the following criteria; otherwise, it is considered a Reader Submission.
    1. The post must be from a university department and not an individual.
    2. The notice must be either about a departmental change that affects the campus-at-large, or an announcement that is imperative for the audience receiving the email.

 

Scheduling Submissions for Email Editions

The Tech Times email edition goes out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 8 a.m., except in the case that campus is closed during the Fall and Spring semesters, and Tuesday and Thursday during the Summer.

The email edition is built the previous business day at 2:00 p.m., except in the case that campus is closed.

Campus Closures

If campus is closed the day an email edition would normally be sent, there will not be an email edition that day.

If campus is closed the day an email edition would normally be built, it will be built the business day prior instead. If campus was closed without prior warning, such as a for a weather-related emergency, there will be no Tech Times edition built and Tech Times will resume its normal schedule when campus reopens.

What do you mean by “business day”?
A business day, in regards to Tech Times, is Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 4:30 PM, barring campus closures (planned or otherwise).

Submitting Your Post

If you wish submit a post for the next email edition, it must be received no later than noon the previous business day to be included. It will be published to the blog that day, so avoid any titles such as “Party on the quad today!” Instead, be date-specific: “Party on the quad on Nov. 6!”

Posts can be scheduled ahead of time for future email editions. In the submission form, be sure to specify which email edition you would like your post to run in. Check the calendar to see which edition will work best for you. Your post will then be scheduled to publish to the blog the business day prior to the email edition you selected, barring campus closures (see above).

Why does my post need to be published in order for it to go into the email edition? The email edition has to link to back to your post. If the post isn’t published, there’s nothing to link back to.

Example 1: Submitting a Post for the Next Email Edition
It’s Thursday afternoon, and you have a post that needs to be published in the Monday Tech Times. If you submit your post any time between now and noon on Friday, it’ll be published to the blog on Friday and will be included in Monday’s email edition.

Example 2: Scheduling a Post for a Future Email Edition
In a few weeks, your office is putting on event. The event is scheduled for Friday, December 18. You know that there isn’t a Tech Times edition that day, but you’d still like a reminder to go out as close as possible before the event. The next closest email edition would be the Thursday edition. You submit a Tech Times post and indicate that you’d like it to go in the Thursday edition on December 17, the day prior to your event. Your post is received and scheduled to be posted to the blog on Wednesday, December 16, so that it is published to the blog in time for the Thursday edition to be built.

Style Guide

When composing your Tech Times posts, it’s important to always, always review your post for correct spelling and grammar. It’s also important to keep in mind the standard Tennessee Tech style guide to keep communications clean, consistent, and professional.

Date and Time

  • Events: For events that have a specific date, time, and place, follow this example: “The lecture is at 11 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 17, in Clement Hall 111.”
  • Dates: Don’t use ordinal endings such as “st,” “nd,” “rd,” or “th.”
  • Time: Always use “a.m.” and “p.m.” and place a space between the number and the abbreviation (i.e. 12 a.m.). If your time ends with “00”, omit the end: 8 a.m., 8:30 a.m., 9 a.m., etc. You should always use numbers instead of words to indicate time except in the case of “noon” and “midnight” (never “12 noon” or “12 midnight”).
  • Months: Use the AP rule for whether a month should be abbreviated or not: Jan., Feb., March, April, May, June, July, Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec.

Tennessee Tech and Buildings

  • Always use Tennessee Tech University, Tennessee Tech, or Tech. Never use TN Tech outside of social media usernames or URLs; and absolutely never use TTU.
  • Building names: Always place building names ahead of room numbers and use the full, official name for the building. Don’t use abbreviations or colloquialisms.
  • Room numbers: Room numbers always follow the name of the building and should be written thus: “Clement Hall 212” Do not use the word “room”. If the room has an official name, use that in place of the number: “Roaden University Center Multipurpose Room”.

Punctuation and Capitalization

  • Comma in a series: Use commas to separate elements in a series, but do not put a comma before the conjunction in most simple series: “The flag is red, white and blue.”
    • Include a final comma in a simple series if omitting it could make the meaning unclear. “The governor convened his most trusted advisers, economist Olivia Schneider and polling expert Carlton Torres.” (If Schneider and Torres are his most trusted advisers, don’t use the final comma.) “The governor convened his most trusted advisers, economist Olivia Schneider, and polling expert Carlton Torres.” (If the governor is convening unidentified advisers plus Schneider and Torres, the final comma is needed.)
    • Put a comma before the concluding conjunction in a series if an integral element of the series requires a conjunction: “I had orange juice, toast, and ham and eggs for breakfast.”
    • Use a comma also before the concluding conjunction in a complex series of phrases: “The main points to consider are whether the athletes are skillful enough to compete, whether they have the stamina to endure the training, and whether they have the proper mental attitude.”
  • Capitalization: Only proper nouns are capitalized. Words like “university,” “college,” “center” or “department” are capitalized only when using the official proper name (Tennessee Tech University, College of Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Oakley STEM Center). All other uses are lowercase (except at beginning of a sentence or bullet point).
  • Title Capitalization: When capitalizing the title of a post, or the title of an event or so on, capitalize all words except for “minor” words unless they are the first or last word of the title. Nouns are always capitalized. For example, “The Pit and the Pendulum”.
  • Personal Titles: Capitalize a person’s title only if the title immediately precedes a person’s name (President Phil Oldham, Professor Jane Smith). When following a name, don’t capitalize (Phil Oldham, president of Tennessee Tech; Jane Smith, professor of mechanical engineering). “Dr.” is not allowed in front of a person’s name. To refer to someone’s terminal degree, place it after their name (Jane Doe, Ph.D.; John Miller, Ed.D.; Pat Smith, M.F.A.). Do not use non-terminal degree abbreviations with names.