The Great Commotion Writing Guide

Writing for the Great Commotion

OK, so you’ve read a couple of battered copies of the Great Commotion that you and your mates found in a pub and you think it’s pretty good. For whatever reason, you want to write something for it; maybe you have always wanted to be a journalist deep down but could never make it in the journalism profession, or perhaps you just know of a local story that the mainstream papers won’t touch.

However, although you have a burning desire to write for our fine newsletter, you haven’t done so because you aren’t quite sure how to write a Great Commotion article. Maybe you are worried that what you will write won’t meet the standards of the overly critical editors, or perhaps you are afraid that whatever you write won’t be interesting to the general public.

Well luckily you can put your fears to rest as I will present you with a few guidelines to help you in your quest to write an article for the Great Commotion.

1. First of all, make sure what you’re writing is appropriate for the Great Commotion. It shouldn’t be too hard to work out what kind of things will be considered newsworthy by the Great Commotion editors. Think about it; the Great Commotion is a libertarian, left wing publication. We like stories that expose the wrong doings of the capitalist system and governmental authority and we have also been known to print stories that promote environmentalism and animal rights. Obviously, if you write an article in favour of capitalism or the state it will almost certainly not get in. When you write something, make sure that it doesn’t suggest anything that goes against our fundamental ideas.

However, even if your article does not challenge our core beliefs, that doesn’t mean it’s the kind of thing we like at the Great Commotion. If your mate Phil from down the road has got the longest beard in the history of mankind, then good for him, but that’s not the kind of news story we like here at the Great Commotion. If a local branch of a multinational corporation has been ignoring enivronmental or safety regulations, or if the local council has ordered the death of ten thousand endangered pandas then we’ll gladly welcome any article on those subjects into the Great Commotion. As we’ve said in the FAQ, any article that strikes us as being racist, sexist or homophobic will be thrown away instantly.

2. Secondly, make sure that you’re article is easy to understand. Write in a clear writing style and try and explain anything you think people may not understand. Would you be able to understand what it was saying if you didn’t have any knowledge of the subject before hand? If you are not sure, have a friend or family member read it and see if they can understand it.

3. Try to make you article as accessible to the average person on the street as possible. This means not writing things that are confusing and hard to understand (see above), but it also means that you should try not to alienate the general population. At this point, pretty much everyone who has written anything for the Great Commotion has had very radical politics, so much of what may seem to be acceptable to us would alienate the general population. Saying something like “All cops are class betraying scum who should be rounded up and shot” may not raise too many eyebrows in your usual class struggle anarchist ghetto, but try saying that to your mum and look at her response!

And before anyone says anything, yes I do realise that this must sound very hypocritical coming from a person who wrote an article that advised people to throw things at the Dutchess of Cornwall.

4. Make sure that the event you are writing about happened recently. It may sound obvious, but the Great Commotion is supposed to be a newsletter. It’s hardly reporting the news if the so called “news story” story is six months old, is it? Of course, if the story is really shocking (like if you have found out that Charles Clarke has murdered someone or that Adrian Ramsey is a paedophile etc) and the mainstream newspapers haven’t touched it then we’d love to get our hands on it.

5. Don’t be afraid to use humour. Ever read something written by the labour party or the conservative party (or for that matter, any political party)? Ever get the feeling that all their propaganda was written by robots. A little humour shows your readers that what they’re reading has been written by a human being. We may even accept articles that have been written primarily for the humour in them. However, while we definately have a place for silly articles, try to keep their length down. We don’t want to have a joke article that takes up half a side of A4 (one quarter of an entire issue). Also, make it very clear that the entire point of the article is to take the piss, we don’t want people thinking that it is a serious article when it’s not.

6. When writing an article, check your facts. Again, this may seem like an obvious point, but try to make sure that all your information is correct. Get your information from reliable sources, don’t write about something when your only source was some drunk stranger that you met down the pub last night. If you have any statistics in your article, make sure that they are the correct figures. The Great Commotion is (or at the very least, is trying to be) a semi-serious newsletter, so imagine if someone notices that something you’ve written is incorrect; it would call into question everything that we’ve published. If one article is wrong, isn’t there a chance that all the others are wrong too?

And obviously, don’t just make stuff up. Base all your articles on facts. If we print an article about how the local McDonalds is using human meat in their burgers, it would make an interesting article, but whether or not it’s true is another matter. We don’t want to go to court, so we’d like to keep all our information factual.

7. If you are desperate to write something, but don’t know anything that you can write about that would be appropriate for the Great Commotion, try looking in the local papers, or watching the local news on TV. If I’m honest, most of what I’ve written has been in some way a rewrite of something I’ve read about in the EDP or the Evening news. However, remember that it’s important not just to repeat what the original article says. If someone wants the evening news’ opinion on a news story they can just read the evening news. What makes your article unique is what you add to it. If I see a news story in the EDP that looks like it belongs in the Great Commotion, I won’t just rewrite it so that it says exactly what the original said. What I’ll do is that I’ll come at the story from an anarchist perspective and add my own knowledge, so that the article I write ends up being quite different from the original.

A good example would be the article about the Churchill Statue (Issue no.4). Although I got the information about the statue from the local paper, I used my own knowledge of Churchill to point the article in a very different direction to any other articles I’ve seen about the statue (and there has been a fair few).

8. Try to keep it short. Remember that the Great Commotion is only an A4 sheet and we want to include as many articles as possible.

9. Try to make sure your article is written in a style that’s consistent with the other articles in the great commotion. We don’t want articles that look out of place. Basically, this means writing in a simple style that anyone can understand (this means cut back on using obscure terms and references. It does not mean make your article look as though it was written for a three year old). If you are somehow involved in the news story you are reporting, write it in the third person anyway. It just looks more professional.

10. Lastly, please don’t get offended if your article doesn’t appear in the Great Commotion. Sometimes we get so many submissions that not everything will fit in. Other times, two people will have written an article on the same subject, so we’ll have to pick one over the other. If your article does not appear, that does not necessarily mean that we don’t like it.

Please also realise that if you submit something, it may not appear exactly as you have written it. When we edit the Great Commotion, we sometimes have to make a few changes to the articles, mainly because they are too long and we have to cut down the length, or because it written in a different style to the rest of the articles and we have to make some small changes so it doesn’t look too out of place.

And that concludes this writing guide. I hope that you have found it useful. Well, that’s enough of that. Send all article submissions to thegreatcommotion.org.uk Get writing folks!