WRITING GUIDELINES FOR PUBLICATIONS by Dee Goto
In 1977, I took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course for the in-home business my husband and I started with Nutrition and Family Counseling. I learned the average listener/reader needs a story with an “Incident”, a “Point” and a “Benefit” to keep their attention for each five minutes. Longer talks and writing need another incident to keep a person engaged.
In starting our OMOIDE program, I noticed there were very few books for children and decided to focus our stories and books to be shared with school children around our state of Washington. The vocabulary of our writing is 5th grade - the average news media level.
Therefore, we keep stories, that are published with illustrations, to an average of 500 words.
The plan for OMOIDE VII is to again have an appendix with short bios with a grade school picture of each author, like we published with OMOIDE IV.