WAAPT:Formatting Tips

If you are new to WAAPT, you may wonder what posting format we demand for RPing. Truth is, we don't care. Use whatever posting style you feel best gets your ideas across; for many of us, that happens to be script, but longform posting is entirely welcome. The important matter is making your posts readable.

Basic Readability

The most important contribution to readability is spacing. There's no special markup to remember for this, just as a general rule remember that it's easier for most people to read a few small paragraphs instead of one big one.

In particular, you might want to start a new paragraph when you introduce an important thought or detail, even if you are still in a description section and haven't reached any action or dialogue.

"Dialogue! How should I handle dialogue?" asked one reader of this section at a very opportune time. "I don't mind if you use my question as an exampl- oh, I see, when dialogue begins you should start it on its own line, but you can then continue the quote in the same paragraph after identifying the speaker."

"However!" I butted in, "when the speaker changes you should absolutely start a new block of text! It's easy for different people to run together otherwise, and nobody wants that. Just ask Alphys."

I was subsequently pelted with a number of shoes, tomatoes, and snakes for my joke in poor taste, providing an opportunity to demonstrate how in longform format, description doesn't need to be set off from dialogue in any special way.

Basket, the Tropius: <That's all well and good, but many people prefer script format!>

<After all, it can be more eyecatching, and you don't need to think up a million synonyms for "he said"!>

<If you do that, however, it is a very good idea to make the speaker's name bold, by using triple-single quotes. Like so:>

'''Basket:''' <Look ma! My name will be bolded when this markup is saved!>

She flared her leaf-wings dramatically, providing an opportunity to demonstrate that in script format, it's usually a good idea to visually separate dialogue from description text, since human speech is frequently left bare without handy <> quotes like Pokémon have.

As she flew off into the night, she showed how to italicize text with double-single-quotes:

''Basket glided through the moonlight, confident that this italicized description would earn her coolness points with the kids.''

-unfortunately for her, the kids all just used dashes to set off their descriptions instead-

-hey, it's two less characters to type!-

Decorating Dialogue

Tangent: Human language is generally left bare, with no special quotation.

Tangent paused, then added, "It may be placed in double quotes, however, especially in non-script format."

Basket: <Pokémon language uses angle-brackets. If you thought angle brackets were Thought-Speak, I applaud your literature choices and direct you down a bullet.>

Xatu: -to the reader- Telepathy is generally placed in italic text, using double-single quotes.

Basket: I did not use a description to indicate that these thoughts could be heard by anybody, so it's probably just my internal monologue, not telepathy.

Nihilego: {What a strange world, not using curly-brackets like my fellow Ultra Beasts do. I heard your monologue, reptile-tree. Probably only because I am melding with your mind, though.}

Basket: <What no help I->

<...muahahah, yes, this power sets me apart!>

Basket: <With a colored nametag, I shall become easier to pick out of a crowd! Conversations involving me shall be even faster to parse different speakers!>

Tangent: Oh, cool, how'd you do that?

[[forestgreen:'''Basket:''']] <Oh, I used the color markup with the double-square brackets like you see here to get this nice "forestgreen" name.>

'''[[forestgreen:Basket:]]''' <Oh, I used the color markup with the double-square brackets like you see here to get this nice "forestgreen" name.>

Tangent: Neat, "teal" works too!

Xatu: <As does "red", "gold", "cinnamon", "green", "blue", "purple"->

Mew: And pink!

Basket: <Curses!>

[[teal:'''Nihilego:''']] [[evil:{FOILED AGAIN!}]]

'''[[teal:Nihilego:]]''' [[evil:{FOILED AGAIN!}]]

Advanced Readability

Once you start interacting with other people, it quickly becomes critical to identify which plot threads and players a given post's events are relevant to.

Especially once you start interacting with multiple distinct plot threads at once.

A header at the start of your post allows you to establish where it fits into the RP events; there are several types of markup that can be used for this purpose.

Typically, you just need to specify the location, as follows:

[[header:Strange Liminal Location of Wikitext]]

@@Strange Liminal Location of Wikitext@@

When you are continuing a scene from days or weeks in the past, specifying the timeframe can help too:

[[header:ARPAnet, 1987]]

@@ARPAnet, 1987@@

And sometimes, a link to the previous events is useful if it was multiple pages ago:

[[header:[[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=12971269370A74820100&page=21197#529908 Way Back When This Happened]] ]]

@@[[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=12971269370A74820100&page=21197#529908 Way Back When This Happened]]@@