Writing

If you are interested in joining us as an Author here on Urban Semiotic, please keep in mind the following writing tips and article policies as you make your way there when it comes to creating post content for publication.

Most Authors begin with us as expert Commenters. It is now the publication policy of Urban Semiotic to require authors and Commenters to go beyond the come-hither simple search-and-pull of Wikipedia and to take the next scholarly step to back up their claims and contentions using established research portals and methods for inclusion in our articles and comments.

1. Be forever interesting. Take a strong point-of-view about an issue concerning the urban core -- find a city semiotic and describe its importance and argue its emergence. Argue a point instead of shoveling a distraction. Aggression, when clean and clear, is always pretty and important.

2. Issues of morality are always more interesting than pure anecdotal stories. Morality is defined on this blog as the intellectual, aesthetic and cultural curing of a person or community ethos. International differences between people are always intriguing.

3. Fun is good, too.

4. The best posts are 300-1,000 words. There is no top end limit for a post.

5. You are formatting your posts for an internet eye and not a paper vision. The eye likes white space. Don't bunch up all your great thoughts into giant clumps of unreadable paragraphs.

6. Spelling and grammar count: Big Time! There are search engine index services that downgrade a return result because of poor spelling and syntax. The right is reserved to edit all posts for content and sentence construction.

7. Do not cuss or curse or unfairly attack others. You can see our Comments page for more information.

8. Your content must be created by you and must only appear here. You own all the rights to the posts and comments you publish here. You may hotlink to and from your posts but if you reuse post material you create here or if you republish your work here elsewhere on the internet you are messing up how the search engines index your work. Having published copies of your work lowers your search return rank. Search Bot services are used here to track the work published here so if you copy and paste here or elsewhere we will find out and immediately remove your material here first.

9. If you use images in your posts, please make sure you own the right to republish them. Upload you images here so they are stored on this server. Images should be no larger than 496 pixels wide. The image file size should be under 25kb.

10. Please do not shill or advertise for other sites in which you or someone you know has a vested interest.

11. A good post title is everything! It should be active and provocative and entice people to click through to read your work when your title is returned in a search result. We can help you write a good title.

12. Try not to use contractions or punctuation in your post titles because they don't universally translate well in search engines or in our current Permalinks structure.

13. We own all rights to your published work and we reserve the right to re-publish you elsewhere or delete your work as we see fit.

14. Remember you are writing for eternity and not the moment. Comments are great but if you only get a few that does not mean what you wrote is any less important than other posts that may get a lot of comments. Great writing lives forever and it is in the unknowable future where you greatness will truly be discovered. Take faith in knowing the life your writing has beyond you.

15. Make sure your article Timestamp is current. If you save a post and work on it for future publication sometimes the Timestamp for publication reflects the first time you saved the post and not the actual date you publish the post. If you publish a post but cannot find it published, do a search on your post title from the Search Box to see if it was published farther back in time.

16. Please make every best effort to post a reply to every comment posted to your article because that is a historic hallmark of this blog. Reply to each individual and not groups of commenters because follow-ups are sent via email and getting a public personal response is better than a shared published response.

17. Read this article about Writing the Right Headline before you submit any work for publication. If you would like to become an Urban Semiotic Author but you don't know what to write about, please use the Contact form to make contact and we can discuss some ideas. Please check this page often for updates and changes. If you have any questions, ask! The only stupid question is the one that goes unasked.