Writing Guidelines & Style Guide
First and absolutely foremost, the Wheel of Time Role-Play is a creative writing site, focusing on quality fiction. These writing guidelines and style guide have been written with the intent that each writer here—be they newly joined or a long-time member—is striving to improve their writing abilities. No one is a perfect writer, but if you follow these writing guidelines, you might just get a bit closer.
The Style Guide part of this page is intended to guide you in complying with this site’s generally accepted writing structures. We can be sticklers about these kinds of things, so please forgive us. However, we don’t ask anything outrageous, so familiarizing yourself with this page is a great way to ensure a happy and fruitful membership. If you’ve written research papers, you know that style guides show you how to reference and format your paper; in a way, that’s what we’re doing here. Alright, on to the good stuff!
Writing Guidelines — The WoT RP Style Guide — Proper Punctuation & Capitalization
Writing Guidelines
The Basic In Character Post
When you first join the Wheel of Time Role-Play with a novice or Gaidin in Training—or any other sort of character—the absolute minimum post that we expect, at all times, is 300 words in about three good paragraphs, four sentences each. The goal of imposing minimum post lengths is to get you used to developing the storyline, setting, and characters within your post. As you gain more rank and responsibility, we expect your post lengths to climb; Accepted and mid-rank Gaidin in Training must write 400 words in every post, though are often required to write more for lessons and the like. The longer you write, however, the easier and easier this will become. Aes Sedai and Warders are expected to write posts always above 500 words. Writing the minimum number of words will not let you advance to the next rank, though, so first rankers should always practice writing more.
Every single post you write should always be spell-checked, and read over for proper grammar and accuracy. Mistakes are human, but a quick read over can save you a lot of time and potential embarrassment down the road. Remember, posts that are riddled with mistakes are up for deletion, so it’s better to save yourself a bit of a headache.
To some extent, we believe that quality does equal quantity, but only at the minimum writing requirements. A five line post is greatly improved by becoming a five paragraph post, but a five paragraph post is not necessarily improved by becoming a five page post. Finding an appropriate length (your teacher probably doesn’t need 10 pages about your character learning how to light a candle) is greatly appreciated. When it comes to longer role-plays such as your Major Role-Play (MRP), you’re very welcome (and encouraged!) to write 10, 20, 30 pages if you like.
It is highly recommended that you write your posts in a word processing program with spell-check enabled before you post; this helps for the spell-checking aspect, lets you know how long your post is, and you can save your post on your computer—which is important if a browser crashes, a board goes down, or some other disaster happens (which always occurs just as you’re finishing off your post but before it makes it up on the board).
Gaming vs. Role-Playing
The Wheel of Time RP is a role-play site. Some sites are a “role-play game” (RPG), but we prefer not to use that with our site. What we do here is recreational and great fun, yet ‘gaming’ holds many connotations that we feel don’t speak to what it is that we’re trying to do here. This website is a community of writers, or those seeking to become writers, who want to create stories by mastering the English language. Like gaming, this can get a bit addictive, but in a totally different way.
We also tend to steer clear of live-time chat role-playing. Stories are built via fiction, written by writers whose personas are indeed separate from their characters. (As in, we’ll call you Bob in emails, not novice John Smith.) However, getting together with your fellow members to chat about what’s going on in a RP is awesome—some great storylines can come out of live time collaboration and planning. That’s why we list contact information on the member pages.
Out of Character Posting
For obvious reasons, there are no length limits on out of character (OOC) posting. Simply keep these posts off of our in character boards; it’s why we have the OOC board! These posts should also use proper spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. Slang is allowed to a certain extent, but things like, “c u l8er” should never, never be posted. Never ever.
The WoT RP Style Guide
Remember these top points, and you’re sure to do just fine.
- Always read over your post for proper spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.
- Everything in character is to be written in third person limited. For example, “She ran down the stairs with an armful of books.” Limited means that your writing should only contain your character’s thoughts—you will not be able to know what other people are thinking, mostly because they aren’t your character.
- Double space all individual paragraphs of writing—much how the main paragraphs of this site are laid out. This includes dialogue, where you should also begin a new line for each new speaker.
- Italics are to be used for emphasis and your character’s thoughts.
- Horizontal rules are used to indicate a passage of time or change of scene.
- Notes on spelling:
- The first rank of training in the White Tower, novice, is written with a small “n” unless it begins a sentence.
- Accepted is pluralized as Accepted, not Accepteds. For example: “She was followed by a gaggle of Accepted, bent on giving her penance.”
- All Wheel of Time words are to be duplicated as they were in the books, with relevant formatting. For example, saidar and saidin are always italicized but not capitalized (unless at the beginning of a sentence), the One Power is always capitalized, and so forth.
- Pluralized acronyms simply have an “s” attached, and do not need apostrophes. For example: RPs, not RP’s. MRPs, not MRP’s.
You should read our page on Proper Punctuation & Capitalization if you feel rusty with how commas, apostrophes, dashes, etc. are used, as we do expect you to use them properly at all times, both in character and out of character.
