If you want the commemoration lists you send to the Altar to be read attentively and unhurriedly, please remember to follow these rules:

• Commemorative lists should be offered before the beginning of the Liturgy. It is best to submit commemorative lists in the evening or early in the morning, before the service begins.
• While you are writing down the names of living and reposed, commemorate them with a clean heart, sincerely wishing them good, and striving to remember those whose names you are writing down. This already is a prayer.
• Bishops and priests are listed first, with their ranks (e.g. “for the health” of Bishop Tikhon, Abbot Tikhon, Priest Yaroslav). After listing bishops and priests, list your own name, and the names of your relatives and close acquaintances. The same applies to lists “for the repose (e.g. Metropolitan John, Archpriest Michael, Alexandra, John, Anthony, Elijah, etc.)
• Write legibly, entering no more than 10 names per page.
• Use the headings "for the salvation of" or "for the repose of."
• If written in Russian, names should be in the genitive case.
• Use the full form of the name, even if commemorating a child. (e.g. not Seryozha but Sergei.)
• Learn the church spelling of saints' names (e.g. not Polina but Apollinaria; not Artyom, but Artemus; not Yegor, but George).
• A child under 7 years of age is called an infant; from 7 to 18 years of age, a youth.
• Do not include surnames, patronymics, titles, or professions of those commemorated, and do not indicate their relationship to you.
• It is permissible to include the words "warrior," "monk," "nun," "ill," "traveling," or "imprisoned."
• Conversely, do not use the terms "erring," "suffering," "embittered," "studying," "grieving," "virgin," "widow," or "pregnant."
• In commemorating the reposed, use the terms "newly-translated", for one who has reposed within the past 40 days, "ever-memorable," or "murdered."

Lists of commemorations may be offered for the Proskomedia, the first part of the Liturgy, at which particles are taken from prosphoras for each of the names listed; later, the particles are put into the Chalice containing the Blood of Christ, as a prayer for the remission of sins of those commemorated is read.

Lists of commemorations may also be offered for Moleben and Panikhida services that are served after the Liturgy. In this case, commemorative lists should be offered separately.

From the book Fundamentals of Orthodoxy