General notes

In this section, you’ll find a brief description of the style of writing you should use while writing for Omni, as well as any loose odds and ends that don’t belong anywhere else. Let’s begin, shall we?

All text at Omni should be written in American English (much to my eternal chagrin — Jack). In terms of vocabulary and complexity of information used, you should write for someone aged 13-14. This roughly equates to the knowledgeable category in Grammarly. Obviously, this may change depending on the calculator: triangle calculator should be aimed at younger users, while a tool on relativistic contractions in actinides should assume the user is fairly proficient in physics/chemistry.

The text should also not be overly formal — we don’t want to appear like a textbook. While this may not come easily, here are some tips:

  • Use contractions, e.g., can’t instead of cannot.

  • Ask the user rhetorical questions, e.g., “Who doesn’t love pizza? That’s right, everyone does!”

  • Include some jokes. They don’t have to be very good, and you can mock yourself in the text after if you like.

  • Create interesting examples. Everyone’s heard of “If a train leaves London at 9:30 travelling at…”, so you could use a spaceship travelling to Mars, or instead of Company A, you could try Liam’s Luxurious Lumber.

  • Just try to have fun when writing the texts!

You should also never refer to yourself in the first person when writing text, but always as “we”, e.g., “We know that numbers are confusing” as opposed to “I know that numbers are confusing.”

We also use the Oxford comma when constructing lists, e.g., “There were three boys: Tom, Dick, and Harry.” If you have only two objects in the list, you don’t need to include a comma after the and.

Please do not copy and paste text from other websites. While you can, of course, check other websites, anything you want to use from them should be written in your own words. The only exception is if it is a direct quote from someone, in which case it should be surrounded in “quotation marks” and referenced after, ideally with a quote if it was first written on a website.

You may want to tell users to visit the advanced mode, in which case advanced mode should be backticked for visibility.

You are encouraged to use emojis but please be somewhat reserved with them, i.e., no emojis after every sentence, three of them together, etc. They can also be used instead of punctuation, e.g., full stops and commas, if you think that it looks good 😎