Culture Vultures Style Guide

The Vision Thing

First, it might be nice to have a neat encapsulation of what The Culture Vulture is all about. We honestly believe The Culture Vulture has a role in promoting peace and harmony across the Pennines, saving the skylark from extinction, granting Alan Bennett a Nobel Prize, and handing Middlesbrough back to Yorkshire, complete with a message from the Boundary Commission saying sorry . . . fair enough, that doesn’t exactly help. The Culture Vulture is a website based in and about the North. The North is as much an attitude as geography.

Above all, The Culture Vulture is a conversation among friends. We always tell our contributors, imagine you are sitting at a table with the people you are writing for – maybe they’ve got a round in if that helps – and they want to know what you thought. Really, genuinely thought. We are all Northern here, you don’t have to be evasive, or artificial, or effusive. We are grown ups and we can handle plain-spoken honesty. We’ve called this being a “critical friend” – and there’s a long overdue blog post explaining that phrase. Simply, it means you are free to form your own opinion and deliver it as vigorously, volubly, and voluminously as you like, as long as you are able to stand by your words, and be open to changing your mind if you come to see you were mistaken. It also means that if you are smart, super-cool, and positively pulsating with your own sense of richly deserved superiority, then please, take a look around you. Are you sure you’re in the right place?

The Culture Vulture makes no pretence to objectivity, neutrality, or balance. This isn’t cut priced journalism or reporting for the Big Society. We are in a different game. We can be as personal and provocative and prejudiced as we like – we can even be passionate, though that’s such a wizened, feeble, gutless word, knackered through overuse by corporate appropriation, that we tend to cross it out whenever we find anyone writing it. We are biased towards building up, not knocking down, doing and not just doodling. Though we have nothing against doodling just so long as it’s in the privacy of your own notebook.

Culture does not divide into neat, straight edged categories. You don’t have to just do food or theatre or minimalist Scandinavian techno or tiddly-winks. It’s ok to enjoy lots of stuff. And it’s great to try something new. You don’t have to contribute as a specialist from a position of authority. Beginners can have interesting things to say too.

The Fine Print

A post does not have to be in written form – though most have been up to now. A post can be podcast, video, photos etc. The medium isn’t important. You could semaphore from the roof of York Minster using a couple of old pairs of Geoffrey Boycott’s cricket whites as flags – that would probably make a featured article – but there is only one rule. If your personality scintillates with all the zing of yesterday’s mug of Mellow Birds, then don’t expect technological wizardry to save you. A bore with a MacBook Pro is still a bore.

Size really does not matter; it’s what you do with it that counts. Don’t be embarrassed if your post is not as big or performance as impressive as some others on the site. Small can be beautiful. Sometimes a quicky is just right.

We think 750 words – plus or minus 250 – is generally sufficient. Any fewer and there’s a suspicion that you are struggling for something to say; more and chances are that you started waffling somewhere after the fifth paragraph and you lost the reader soon after. If you really need more than a thousand words consider writing two posts, or even three. The only real rule is carry on until you get boring. For many people this occurs the moment after the laptop has booted up. Contributions to The Culture Vulture cannot be boring.

We are always asked about visuals. Yes, you do need at least one photo, sent separately and not in the body of the post, for the homepage excerpt picture. That’s just the way the site works. Don’t go getting us into trouble by ripping someone off. Either take one yourself or make sure to attribute properly . . . you know what photographers are like!

Posts should be submitted in Word. Unless you have a login; in which case the following still applies.

There should be only one space after a full stop and two hard returns after a paragraph. That’s so there’s some white space between paragraphs. Trust us, your post will look very different on our website than it does on your word processor. And don’t make us do your formatting for you, life is tedious enough.

.          New paragraphs do not need an indent.

Ellipses, indicating omitted words or pauses for … comedy timing, are space stop stop stop space … Just like that. Not like this…Like that … Got it? … Good.

Don’t be afraid of long sentences, full of windy digressions, back-tracking conditionals and a thicket of subclauses, as they add rhythm and variety to your writing, and they show that you trust your reader to have outgrown Janet and John; but if you carry on like a drunk trying to give directions for a long forgotten pub then prepare to be sobered up and sent home.

Preferably keep paragraphs short.

They are easier to read and look better on the screen.

Headlines Should Be Capitalised, But Needn’t End With a Full Stop

All posts need an excerpt (that little box of text that accompanies the pic on the home page.) You can suggest your own or leave it to one of the editors.

Include relevant tags, including location, event title, venue etc., but don’t overdo it.

Let the editor choose the category.

This Is The Way To Do It

Email your post to [email protected] or whichever of our editors has contacted you.

If this is your first post for us it would be nice if you sent a hundred words or so of introduction. Who are you, anyway?

Contributors who have a login to the site need to leave their post in drafts and notify the editors, or book it into The Culture Vulture’s calendar. We are introducing a scheduling system to ensure each post gets sufficient time at the top of the site.

Not every submission can be posted. If the post is unsolicited and doesn’t meet our criteria we will be polite. If we commissioned the post and for some reason it doesn’t quite work then we will give constructive, friendly criticism. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try again.

Every post submitted is in a queue. This means that there’s no automatic guarantee that your post will be on the site immediately. There are lots of people writing for The Culture Vulture and we try to be fair and stick to the schedule. If your post is about an upcoming event it makes sense to get it to us in plenty of time. We know that’s obvious, but some people!

If you send something to an editor at midnight expecting the post to be up by five past, you are having a laugh. We don’t share your whacky sense of humour. Emailing, texting and tweeting every twenty minutes to enquire about the progress of the post will, of course, speed things up enormously . . . and if you believe that refer to the previous comment about sense of humour.

Do’s and Don’ts

Don’t just send a flyer or a press release or a bit of marketing guff. If you are genuinely enthusiastic about your event prove it. Don’t be lazy. Make us not want to miss it.

Don’t just go and post the same thing on your own website. Think about it; why would you?

Do send new material only. We don’t do sloppy seconds.

Do spell check and correct any grammar gaffes before you send. Everyone makes mistakes, but patience is a finite resource.

If you’re writing a review or a thought piece or just having a good old rant then imagine that you are with an old friend. Remember, we’ve already been through this. You don’t need to impress anyone. And spare us the snarky. If you reread your own prose and realise that you sound like a dick then that’s what other people are likely to think too. And clever dicks are the worst. Save the piled up polysyllables for your PhD supervisor. They get paid to read that stuff.

Remember, it’s a conversation. Your individual post is just a contribution. It doesn’t have to be perfect, definitive or decisive. You can always come back to the subject, change your mind, write another post with further thoughts, or comment on someone else’s post.

We encourage you to be imaginative, inventive and playful. These are not rules, they are merely guidelines, and you don’t have to behave . . . but if you choose flout any of the guidelines it had better be for a good reason, and not that you couldn’t be bothered or are simply a sloppy writer. The delete button is only a microsecond away.