Guidelines for Letters to the Editor

A letter to the editor reflects the view of a member of the campus community and is submitted to the publication for approval.

Readers may submit letters to letters@collegian.com. Please follow these guidelines to ensure your letter can be published:

1. Please include your full name and your job title. If you are a student, please include your major and year. Additionally, please mention in the body of your letter if you hold any qualifications that may bolster the credibility of your argument. Anonymous columns will not be published except under circumstances in which the writer can reasonably prove that publishing their name next to their opinion would endanger their personal safety. It is important that no one, except in those few special cases, expect their viewpoint to be published anonymously because an explicit attribution helps the credibility of the opinion section. To be able to vet the source of a claim is essential, and personal name-based accountability helps ensure civility.

2. Please refrain from including personal attacks on Collegian authors or people referenced in Collegian articles. Feel free to critique what someone wrote or how they wrote it, but ad hominem attacks cannot be published.

3. Please use paragraph form. Lists are difficult for us to format to fit our spaces correctly.

4. Please cite all facts and provide links or citations to where any facts in your letter were found. We retain the right to fact check ourselves and remove or edit anything we find not factually sound. We can decide to not publish an LTTE if we determine its claims regarding factual statements are unsupported.

5. We retain the editorial right to edit content for length and clarity. We will also edit information that poses a legal liability to Rocky Mountain Student Media Corporation and its entities. We will never edit a piece to change the message or viewpoint being conveyed.

6. If you are a professor or instructor, please do not assign submitting a letter to the editor as a class assignment. Letters are meant to be opinions from the community, not obligations from students.

7. If The Collegian would like to publish your letter, a member of our staff will reach out to you. If we do not want to publish your letter, you will not hear from us. Due to the high number of letter to the editor submissions, we unfortunately cannot respond to every submission that we will not be publishing. Please do not send repeated emails checking on the status of your letter.

8. Please keep your submission at or under 650 words long.

Thank you. We look forward to hearing from you.