Style Guide

PaxLair Times Office, Silent Rose Library, PaxOku, Tokuno, Chesapeake (PaxLair Times) – September 1, 2010 – by Winfield – This article helps PaxLair Times reporters write articles.  Consider this a Style Guide.

1. Edit the BYLINE on the first line of the article.  For a NEW Post, the text that has <strong>City or Area, Facet, Shard (</strong><a href=”./”><strong>PaxLair Times</strong></a><strong>) – Month Day, Year – by Author – </strong>, just switch to VISUAL with a button and change the words as appropriate. Leave the PaxLair Times and it’s link the same.  But edit the other words. This is the ByLine all articles get.  Make that Month Day, Year as the date of the event usually… so if writing an article about something last week, still make that date last week.  So when we look in archives, we can find events by date.  Sometimes people write today’s date and say Yesterday, which is OK, but we’d prefer it to be as written on that day in the byline.
2. If you receive an article from someone else and you publish it, their name goes in the BYLINE of the article.  If they contributed information to your article, and you rewrote a lot, then you are the author and they are a contributor.  The BYLINE would have — by YourName, contribution by TheirName —
3. Write a decent LEAD PARAGRAPH for the first paragraph.
4. Generally, write articles in NEWS STYLE.
5. Write in THIRD PERSON point of view unless you are writing an editorial.
6. Write IN CHARACTER in the nature of ROLE-PLAYING.  We are not writing Out of Character articles here.  We are not writing about Out of Character Game Mechanics either.
7. Link to uoguide.com articles as desired so people can get more research information.
8. DO NOT VIOLATE COPYRIGHT LAWS.  Just because something is published on the Internet does not mean it is Public Domain.  Check if something is copyrighted, and get permission to republish, or paraphrase sufficiently and reference it.  We may have PaxLair Times standard republishing rights with places like UOForums or UO Stratics to increase circulation, but those are not established right now.  So paraphrase, use in research, and reference/footnote your sources.  If it’s your own article, then write what you want.
9. CROP YOUR IMAGES to decent sizes for the readers.  Don’t include an entire UO screen if you don’t need  all the areas of the image published.

(more to come)