Blooncyclopedia:Writing guidelines

Patch is taking notes

This wiki encourages a casual, matter-of-fact style of writing that isn't as dry and authoritative as, say, Wikipedia. A little flippancy is acceptable as long as your writing is mainly focused on facts and conveying essential information about the topic. That said, good writing is about a lot more than just using proper spelling and grammar, so your writing still must follow certain standards.

Per our code of conduct, inflammatory, hateful, offensive, age-inappropriate, or profane writing is unacceptable and will result in administrative action towards offenders.

Things to avoid

• Speculation: This wiki strives to be as factually accurate as possible, and speculation in article text is heavily discouraged without strong evidence. This includes speculation about "lore" and upcoming features. When in doubt, discuss your ideas on a talk page.
  • Speculating about gameplay is strictly forbidden; if you think a mechanic works a certain way, you have to test it and see for yourself. (See Blooncyclopedia:Citing sources for information about when game mechanics need to be cited.) If you can't prove it, then it doesn't belong here.
• Flowery/pedantic prose: Don't use overly fancy words and exaggeration to describe things that can be summarized more concisely, like describing in-game text containing a single minor swear as a "profanity-ridden remark". This isn't a work of literary fiction.
• Stating the obvious: If the role of the subject is self-evident from the name, then it doesn't need to be stated. For example, "Dart Monkeys are monkeys who wield darts" is not a good opening sentence.
• Second person: Avoid referring to the reader directly. Use "the player" instead of "you" when describing actions taken by players, and use the name of the subject when describing actions taken by something in the game. For example, "if the player activates Rapid Shot, Quincy will destroy the MOAB on round 40 easily" is good, but "if you activate Rapid Shot, you will destroy the MOAB on round 40 easily" is not. Strategy articles are an exception to this since they're more casual, but they should still use the second person sparingly, if at all.
• Passive voice: Passive voice is describing an action as being applied to the subject, rather than the subject applying an action. "Quincy will destroy the MOAB on round 40" is active voice, while "the MOAB on round 40 will be destroyed by Quincy" is passive voice. These mean the same thing and are both grammatically correct, but the latter conveys it in a more awkward and roundabout way. Passive voice should only be used if the subject of the sentence is unknown.
• Editorializing: Don't criticize something or make it sound bad just because you don't like it. Keep it strictly factual, such as listing a tower's weaknesses to certain Bloons or situations, or giving the pros/cons of a subject in comparison to something.
• Exclamation marks or writing in all caps: Use italics if special emphasis is needed.
• Excessively long paragraphs: Always break your paragraphs up into more digestible chunks. Long paragraphs can be hard to read, especially on mobile devices.

When to be flippant

• Witty remarks should be relevant to the topic, be used sparingly, and be kept out of sections describing technical details or complex game mechanics. Good places for these include image captions (if the image is otherwise self-explanatory) and strategy sections.
• Edits that just add, remove, or change humor and do not add to or improve anything in the article are not constructive and will be reverted, unless the article is clearly overdoing the humor. When in doubt, ask about it on the talk page.

Frequently misused terms

• Remix: A remix of a song is a modification of an existing recording (such as adding extra percussion). A new recording of a song with different instrumentation is called an "arrangement". For example, most of the tracks in Bloons Adventure Time TD are arrangements of music from Adventure Time, not remixes.
• Alpha and beta: These refer to very specific periods in software development, and are not general terms for when things change during development. These should only be used to refer to periods that have been explicitly called alphas or betas by official sources, such as the closed beta for Bloons Monkey City. Even if an early build is officially called a "beta", avoid describing its differences with terms like "beta elements" and "beta differences" because casual readers tend to misinterpret these as referring to changes in development in general.
• Prequel: A prequel is a work whose narrative chronologically takes place before a previously released work. This is often misused to describe any work that has a sequel that released after it; calling Bloons Tower Defense a prequel to Bloons Tower Defense 2 because the latter is its successor is incorrect. Since Bloons games have minimal plot and no timeline, this term has little, if any, use on this wiki.

Things that don't matter

Articles shouldn't be edited just to "correct" these, because they just aren't worth policing.

• American vs. British English spelling, outside of certain circumstances
• The Oxford comma
• Contractions (e.g. "can't" over "cannot")
• Periods and commas inside quotation marks