How would tell a publisher this?
Many publishers from newspapers to magazines to do when composing their pages. I might not be a big thing to everyone out there, but I think the publication would look better.
I pick up many well printed full-color magazines with some of their headlines hyphenate. Plus many of the stories with the flush left copy hyphenate.
With 1/2 inch to the right of the copy why Hyphenate?
And, I think Headline shouldn’t be Hyphenate.
I wrote to a few publishers and never heard back from them.
Would there be a better way to express my view to them?
Get a blue pencil and make the positive corrections and send the copy to them. Reality is they likely don’t care. ” casting pearls at swine” comes to mind.
I agree with Mike. Only it’d be casting a whole lot of pearls.
Are we talking NY Post? National Enquirer?
You all have great points, but most newspapers and magazines are businesses created to make money. Unless they are a arts based publication with benefactors and deep pockets. They look to balance cost to content for everything and hyphenation allows for more words per inch. As a designer I’ve run into this on many, many occasions.
As for them not getting back to you, well that is a sign of the times. The young and not so young professionals don’t have or make the time if it is not directly affecting them in some way.
That’s why we do our own work though isn’t it?
The way I would tell them is to simply stop buying and reading their “rag”. Losing readership means they can’t charge as much for advertising, therefore it hits them in the wallet. Even if they don’t get the message, as you are no longer looking at the copy, it will maybe no longer bother you?
Sorry if this sounds like an old man wittering on, but its a fact that in the 1950s if you committed such sins on the UK Manchester Guardian (under Harold Scott) or on the Daily Mail (when journalists actually wanted to work there(!) its now a dreadful rag) you would have been spoken to very forcefully indeed, likely by the Editor himself. So sad to see
standards going down so steeply. Journalists were by definition in those days literate in the best sense.
In this computer world, if the publication is composed in InDesign or Quark Express all they need to do is set in style window to have no hyphenation for this style.
At the publication, I work at I set the style panel for headlines and photo cutlines for no hyphenations.
And in the body section, I set the hyphenations for no less than 5 characters.
My grandfather was a compositor in NYC for 50 years. I remember him back in the late 1970s making the same comments. He would look at a column in a newspaper and complain how the rivers would run through the column. He would point out that by just changing a line slightly the whole paragraph would be justified.
Mike