10 Commandments for Columnists

[brad_dykens]

Columnists are required to read and respect the following 10 Commandments if they expect to get noticed as a writer on OWW. The only thing that will get your Column deleted is excessive profanity or extreme defamation of someone's character. Writers are welcome to post columns on any subject, however, if a writer wishes to increase his or her chances of having their column posted on the main Online World of Wrestling page, then they will have to work very hard and it would be in their best interest to obey the 10 Commandments because only a limited number will be chosen per week. Consider this your bible.



THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR COLUMNISTS

01. NO PARODIES: This covers everything from eFeds to role-playing to whatever the heck they call it these days. There is another section for that on OWW Genesis. If someone comes on and reads a parody thinking it is actual news or information it will cause confusion. We are no longer accepting Top 10 Lists either, although there are ways to incorporate lists in your columns if you are creative.

02. NO TV/PPV RECAPS OR PREDICTIONS: They are already taken care of on OWW for the purposes of archiving. You can go to a zillion websites and find two zillion thumbs ups or thumbs downs.. We value your opinion but overkill will only serve to flood the site with useless junk.

03. NO PRESS RELEASES: This is not the place to promote your upcoming Indy show in Hicktown, USA. We love the independent circuit and will support it as much as we can, but there are thousands of promotions out there and we can't give free promotion to all of them. If you are an Indy promoter we will post short form results in the Indy Results Section.. Press Releases will be deleted, with no exceptions.

04. NO BABBLING: The best columns are those with a specific topic; do not babble on incoherently about something unspecific. Have a brief opener, get to the point, support your information with details, and wrap it up.

05. LIMIT WWE or TNA ANALYSIS: Over-analyzing the WWE and TNA product doesn't help anything. It does absolutely nothing to post a dozen "How I would fix the WWE or TNA" columns. Everyone has his or her own ideas. No offence, but you're a fan, you're a mark, you would crash & burn if you were in a position of control within the WWE or TNA.. And those companys do not give a rat's ass what you think anyway, so they are not reading it. NOTE: The Editors are prepared to be a bit more flexible with this rule. However, any columns that blatantly state "This is what WWE/TNA is doing wrong and how I would fix it" will NOT be considered for main page selection.

06. OLD-SCHOOL CONTENT IS EXTREMELY ENCOURAGED: The demand for Kayfabe Era information is extremely high right now and that is why we put so much into out profiles section.. I'll tell you one thing, the articles that cover the past, or discuss a certain event in the past, get the most hits within the Column section. Some people are confused by the definition of "old-school." Let me clear this up right now; The Smoking Gunns are NOT old-school. Lou Thesz IS old-school. The Rock is NOT old-school. Bruno Sammatino IS old-school. Old-school wrestling, or kayfabe as we call it, refers to everything prior to 1989.

07. INDEPENDENT CONTENT IS ENCOURAGED: Like I said, this is NOT the place to post press releases, but if you want to pay tribute to an independent promotion, performer, or big event, then by all means go for it.

08. EDIT, RE-EDIT, AND THEN EDIT AGAIN: The odd spelling mistake or typo will be taken in stride if the rest of the column and its content is valuable, but the Editors will simply ignore submissions that are riddled with spelling, grammatical, structural or punctuation errors. If you have a word processing program on your computer with spelling and grammar checkers, USE them before you submit your column. If you have a parent, friend, sibling, partner, teacher or the like to assist you, then please, ask them for help. OWW's main page will only contain columns of high quality and content.

09. SUBMISSION RULES: Please Copy/Paste text into the Forums. If you are posting photos to accompany your column, please do not direct link photos from other websites without permission. I will allow you to direct link ONE photo from OWW if you wish to do that. You may host photos yourself on some photo sharing website. .

10. WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: Please credit yourself using your REAL NAME, or a REALISTIC NAME, fake internet alias' are NOT COOL. You should be proud of your work, and if you're embarrassed, then you shouldn't be writing on OWW in the first place. If you want partial anonymity, then just use an initial for your last name like Lou T. or Jimmy J. or Danny W. or Lucy F. and so on.