Can We Add Formatting Tips and/or Poetiquette to the sidebar? (improvement ideas for r/PoeticReddit)

Hey guys. This is something I have pleaded via comment for the mod of r/poetry to do many times, and I'm sure most of you r/Poetry redditors know why...There's a post asking how to format poems probably every other week. Plus, there are those people that try to format or don't know how to format and their poems end up coming across as text-walls that are difficult to read and prevent the poems/poets from getting the best possible feedback. So, mod(s), can we get a link to formatting tips in the sidebar so everyone can see it? I'll even put my (frequently repeated) $.02 in right here:

In order to create line breaks
you can hit space twice after each line
and there will be no spacing between the lines (unlike double enter)

the added benefit of that is
you can use double-enters to create stanza breaks
as a space appears between the two double-entered lines

like this.

another way people have used to make line breaks
is indent each line with four spaces, so it is treated like code
it makes the font a bit smaller which I find a little harder to read 
(I have to squint) 

but this way you get the most defined stanza breaks 
(using double-enters between blocks of "code" lines)

Also, it would be a great idea if we could get maybe some general guidelines or Reddiquette going for this subreddit. Back in r/poetry there were a few threads discussing the problem of "Lots of submissions, no comments" and in one of them (can't remember) a few suggestions were made, like the following:

  • Please only submit 1 poem/day (or some other reasonable limit)

  • Please try to read other submissions and comment on them - it encourages a feedback loop, where those who receive comments may be more likely to "give back" and also give some critiques (Honestly if there were some way to regulate this - like a critique/poem ratio, similar to an upload/download ratio on some torrenting sites - I think we should try it - but I understand it's probably not viable, nor do we want to police r/poetry submitters & readers

  • When critiquing, try to give both positives and negatives about the poem. It's very hard to get the most out of a critique that's only negative - often it will only discourage the writer instead.

I was thinking it might also be a good idea to link to the MFA Poetry AMA that went on a few weeks back with Amish Trivedi...I know it's in the r/Poetry subreddit so might be weird to link to it in the /PoeticReddit sidebar, but it answered a lot of questions I'm sure aspiring poets have about getting published, pursuing higher education, etc.

Edit Here is the MFA AMA in r/Poetry a while ago, it was pretty successful. Also another idea: what about linking to related subreddits like r/whatstheword, etc?

So poets...any other ideas?

Posted Aug 12, 2011, 7:35 PM UTC · edited

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