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All The Tropes:Style Guide: Difference between revisions
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Also, be aware that we have a number of templates used to insert standard markup into trope pages, like the examples and tropelist banners and the top-of-page elements specific to the various page types. Many of these will be automatically inserted into pages created in the Trope Workshop or with the ATT Page creator, but there are others which you can use to add features to your pages which will automatically conform to this guide. If you want to find out more about these, and learn what other templates might be available to you, see our page [[All The Tropes:Our Custom Templates]].
=== Proper English Grammar and Usage ===
This is ''important'', perhaps more important than anything else on this page: If your edit or your proposed new page reads like it was written by ChatGPT, Google Translate or a dyslexic ten-year-old (or any/all of them working together) it will either get rejected (if your edits are still being moderated) or reverted<ref>Although any user who is not subject to Moderation ought to be writing in proper English already -- it's one of the requirements for leaving "Moderated" status.</ref>. Although wiki admins have been known to step in and do their best to translate user contributions from whatever they were written in to proper English, it is ''not'' their responsibility to do so -- it is that of the user(s) who want to see their edit or page live in the wiki. If your text is so badly written a reader can't figure out what it means, or your examples are so garbled their relevance to the trope or work you've added them to cannot even be guessed at, it has ''failed'' at what it is supposed to do, which is ''communicate clearly and succinctly'' something about a pattern in storytelling.
Illiterate contributions ''will'' be rejected. And refusing to improve your contributions when this is pointed out to you is grounds for a ban.
=== Adding Examples to Tropes ===
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Immediately after the trope link is a colon (":"). Don't forget it, or you may get a little note from a mod or another user who's had to go in and add them to your work. Don't use dashes or long dashes or anything else here. And it, too, gets followed by a space -- that's a general punctuation rule, not just for readability here.
Finally, the explanation of how the trope applies to the work. This is ''mandatory''. [[Zero Context Example]]s are subject to deletion. Work pages with nothing but Zero Context Examples are themselves subject to deletion if no one chooses to rescue them.<ref>Assuming we have time. Usually they just get tagged with {{tl|trope list needs context}}, which puts them onto [[:Category:Trope list needs context|this "cleanup" list]].</ref> One of the most valid criticisms of troping is that what we do is nothing but mindless cataloguing. If you don't explain how the trope functions (and why) in this work, then you're confirming that criticism. Put thought into writing a description that not only explains where in a work the trope is found, but how it works as a part of the story, and what makes it important.
Finally, your trope should be inserted in proper alphabetical order. Most of the time this should be obvious if you're a frequent user of the Latin alphabet, but there are edge situations and unclear cases. If you need help, see "Alphabetization", below, or our page [[All The Tropes:How to Alphabetize Things|How to Alphabetize Things]].
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Sometimes you might think it's necessary (or more attractive) to use a pothole with a work name. For instance, the ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' novels are all described on subpages under [[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]], like ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish]]''; potholing that link to ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish|So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish]]'' just looks better. Go ahead and do that. Just be careful not to misspell or otherwise mangle the work name in the pothole. And once more, if you're not sure how to code a pothole, the markup is <code><nowiki>[[link|pothole text]]</nowiki></code> -- the link, a vertical bar, and then the text you want to have go to that link.
While you can pothole a plural version of a page name, you don't need to. Both <code><nowiki>[[Gasshole|Gassholes]]</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>[[Gasshole]]s</nowiki></code> create the link [[Gasshole]]s, and the shorter version is easier to read in the source editor.
Again, [[Pothole]]s are good, while [[sinkhole]]s are bad. Potholes and Sinkholes where different parts of ''the same word'' link to different pages are horrid - there's no way for a casual reader to know (or even suspect) that there's more than one link in the word. Unless you happen to take advantage of the wiki's color-coded internal links, but then it looks [[It Gets Worse|rid]][[From Bad to Worse|icul]][[It Got Worse|ous.]] It's also an [http://blogaccessibility.com/sin-2-of-inaccessible-blogs-using-consecutive-one-worded-links/ accessibility sin].
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Since all headers on a page appear in that page's table of contents, section headers should not be used as a replacement for boldface. (Yes, we know we have hundreds if not thousands of pages, especially Characters subpages, where they are used this way; these pages were inherited from TV Tropes. If you see a page like this, please fix it!)
''A special note on the "References" and "Notes" headers:'' We are not Wikipedia. If we wanted to look like Wikipedia, we would have added the References header to the "reflist" template years ago. Don't add "<nowiki>== References ==</nowiki>" or "<nowiki>== Notes ==</nowiki>" to any of our Trope, Work, or Creator pages or their subpages. Similarly, don't add a line between the page content and the "reflist" tag unless there's a [[stinger]] on the page.
== Alphabetization ==
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|This is who said it|This is the work he said it in.}}
Note that the quote template automatically indents the quote; there's no need to do so yourself with additional markup. Nor do you need to separate the paragraphs (or lines) of the quote with a blank line
You can use virtually any markup inside a quote, including internal and external links. Note that each line inside a quote is, in effect, a separate paragraph, separate from the rest even for markup. Any kind of markup which you want to apply to the whole quote -- like putting it all in italics -- will need to be applied to each line separately.
The {{tl|quote}} template does have one annoying
That said, we have certain styles we use for different kinds of quotes that we strongly recommend and which will be eventually imposed on your quotes by a mod if you don't do it yourself. These are:
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We like to see lyrics in italics. Put each line on a separate line in the quote -- don't use slashes to delimit lines and put it all in one solid block. Separate verses with a single blank line, nothing else. And because of the line-is-a-paragraph behavior mentioned above, you'll need to start each line with italics markup. A lyric quote should look like:
{{quote|
''Violets are purple'']],
''Don't expect this to rhyme''
''It's just an example.''
''Second verse, same as the first.''
''{{'}}Cause I'm too lazy to write more.''}}
The last line demonstrates one other markup issue you'll need to be aware of, although it applies everywhere in the wiki, not just in the {{tl|quote}} markup. If you have a word which starts with an apostrophe -- like 'tis, 'cause, 'til -- and you want to put italics markup in front of it, you need to code it in a similar way to the equals sign to keep three single quotes in a row from turning into '''bold''' markup. Use <nowiki>{{'}}</nowiki> and the wiki won't know it's there and won't give you the wrong font.
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These are passages copied directly from a text work, and retaining their general layout. In general -- and especially when they're the top-of-page quote for a page -- we want to see them in italics. As before that means marking each line individually. And anywhere in the quote there was already italics needs to be turned into bold.
Further advice: Don't linewrap text manually -- one line
{{quote|''Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod '''tempor incididunt''' ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. ''
''Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.''}}
== See Also ==
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