text: ##Good Morning ShortStories! Cody here to formally announce a few changes to the sub. We aren't making any titanic shifts in how we do things or cracking down on content. What we do want to do is make this place look a bit more polished. This is a sub more for readers than writers. After all, our authors post stories here with the intent that they will be read. With that in mind we want to make the reading experience a bit more pleasant. This entails a few things: &nbsp; 1. **Present your story as a story.** This means in your post title, use proper titling rules: capitalizing first letters appropriately. The good rule of thumb is 'important' words - nouns, action verbs, adjectives, and adverbs - are capitalized while transitive verbs and articles stay lowercased. Look to any published book for an example of this or go and let it do it for you. This will help make a post standout in a feed as a short story and make prospective readers more likely to open your post. Plus, it just looks nice when scrolling through. 2. **Keep it to the story**. Please don't treat your story like the front half of a recipe online. We don't need to know the origins and circumstances of it's creation. If you want to share it, please make it a top level comment, but keep the body of your post to the story, a link to the subreddit, and a feedback request if you are looking for it. 3. **Format your story itself.** Don't post a single block of text. Very few people want to read that. A few common mistakes we see and will be reasons for removal: * The aforementioned wall of text. Break up your paragraphs. Besides making it easier to look at, those breaks make it easier to not get fatigued. Our brains take a small breath of air at the ends of paragraphs. * Make new paragraphs when speakers change in dialogue, and use the correct punctuation - quotation marks - to indicate dialogue. We aren't going to remove because you didn't follow the minutia of English grammar. We understand everyone is at a different level, but we do have a base standard that we are going to hold you to. * Codeblocks. These are basically textboxes inside the post that can stretch on into infinity. These happen because you wanted to indent your paragraphs. 4 spaces = "This section is in code" to reddit markdown. We recommend just not indenting. Reddit is weird and we are used to reading without indents. If you really want to include them copy and paste this: >\&nbsp;\&nbsp;\&nbsp;\&nbsp; There may be a narrative reason to use these such as actually showing code in a software espionage thriller story. If they fit the narrative that is fine, but 99% of the codeblocks we see are in error. * We know getting used to Reddit's markdown quirks can be difficult. If you are on new reddit with the fancypants editor, many of these things are handled for you and you won't notice a problem unless you specifically enter markdown mode. Old Reddit and mobile reddit though still have to contend with the markdown. The moderation team recommends getting the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension and viewing from old reddit. It offers a live preview of your post so you can see what it will look like before posting. If that isn't for you, or you are on mobile apps - which it looks like about 70% of you are - you can also go and preview your post. * A lot of this can be boiled down to one simple imperative: post polished work. It shouldn't look like a rough draft. Have pride in what you are putting out there for people to read. In turn readers are far more likely to enjoy what you spent time and energy making. &nbsp; We know there is a lot of legacy content that does not follow these rules, but we have to start somewhere. So please do not come to us saying, "But I saw it here" and link to old approved stories. This is the now, and the rules on the sidebar clearly state our new expectations. We are one of the larger repositories of stories on reddit.