Thank you very much for writing for us! To ensure uniformity across our website, please abide by the following guidelines. If you feel like negotiating these guidelines for your piece, just drop Ben an email.

General

  1. Opinion pieces should ideally be less than 2500 words, and less than 3000 maximum. Reviews should be less than 1000 words.
  2. Please write in English, and in a “smart casual” tone. Our rule of thumb is that we write for an informed but non-academic audience.
    1. Since Kopimotion does its best to make ideas accessible, we advise writers to avoid directly quoting theories and theorists except where you deem it unavoidable. Instead, we prefer giving a sketch of these ideas in jargon-free language, and then either providing a link to an external website explaining the idea or crediting these theorists in the Credits section at the end of the piece.
  3. Please provide English translations for non-English quotations.

Names, titles

  1. In the title of the article, and in the first mention of the media text’s title in your prose, put the year of release in parentheses after the title. The parentheses and its contents should not be italicised.
  2. Film/TV series/book titles should be italicised in every instance, except in the title of your article, where it should be in inverted commas (because WordPress titles cannot be italicised).
  3. Platform names (e.g. Channel 5, Toggle, Netflix) are not italicised.
  4. Individual episode names, or articles and shorter pieces of writing, should should be unitalicised and in inverted commas.
  5. Episode numbers may be notated in the AxB format, e.g. Season 2 Episode 5 would be “2×5”.
  6. When mentioning a character for the first time, put the actor’s name in parentheses after the character’s name.
  7. In first mentions of actor/director names, refer to them in full. Subsequently, refer to them either with their character’s name or, where relevant, with their surname (or name if the actor does not have a surname).

Punctuation

  1. Use double inverted commas, and single inverted commas within double inverted commas.
  2. Periods and commas should be outside the quotation marks.
  3. If you choose to use headings, they should be in sentence capitalisation.

Reader Safety

  1. Where necessary, please give a content warning at the beginning of the article if you discuss sensitive topics such as violence and discrimination, or if you use graphic images in your article.
  2. The content warning should be bolded, in title case, and precede your article proper.

Use of images

  1. Please provide a header image. This image should be in landscape and not contain graphic or explicit material.
  2. Images used throughout the article should also have a width of 700px.

Ending matter

  1. At the end of your piece, we require two sections, as well as one additional section where relevant. The required sections are “Credits” and “About the Writer”; the possible extra section is one that gives screening details if the film is one that was recently played/is playing.
  2. For “About the Writer”, please submit a short biographical write-up that will be included at the bottom of your article.
  3. Please also submit a longer write-up that we can feature on our Writers page.
  4. For “Credits”, please write in a sentence list, separating each entry with a semicolon; please look here for an example.
  5. Please include the conditional section if the film was recently played. Please look here for an example of how to format this section.

Plagiarism

  1. Kopimotion takes plagiarism seriously, and we will refuse to publish work containing plagiarised material. Please cite your sources and offer credit where it is due.