The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle is a journal limited to only members of Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honors Society, and is published annually every April. This is their Creative Writing journal, so they only accept textual pieces. There is no art for the cover, but it is instead in the colors of Sigma Tau Delta. I chose volume 93 because it is their most recent publication.
I had some pros and cons regarding how they set up the magazine. First, I’ll start with the cons and end on a high note with the pros. To start, I don’t like the size of the magazine. It doesn’t feel wide enough, and it is hard to open and read because of that. The cover paper is also of low quality, as it was very easy to bend it and leave a mark in the spine where it was bent. Also, I felt their use of white space was useless, especially when paired with such short margins. The way they used their white space would have been better if the margins were a bit bigger, though I understand why they did it. There were several things I liked about it, though. To begin, the font choice was a great one, and I liked how they put the page numbers on top, which is not a normal choice and makes it stand out. I also liked how they broke up the genres with a page announcing the next genre. I also liked how they put the notes on contributors at the end of each contributor’s work. I also liked how they depicted the title and author of each work, with the title as the main title, and the author as a subtitle.
The work in this magazine is fantastic. It is hardly surprising that it is competitive to get your work in this magazine. It does contain mostly pieces of poetry, with about 20 of the submissions being poems, but I thought that the Non-Fiction and Fiction was interesting, as well.
Overall, there were some things that I didn’t like about this magazine at least as far as organization is concerned, but the pieces were definitely of high quality, and I enjoyed a lot of the pieces in there.
-Sarah Moore, Managing editor