Red Rants is looking to open up to the community to post on the main blog in the form of a competition. The best two (or three) bloggers, at the end of this competition will get to blog on RR for a year. Of course, there are rules for this, for which you’ll have to read on.
1) Number of Entries: One entry per person.
2) Size: There will not be word limits, but you wouldn’t want to send in two small paragraphs for consideration either.
3) Kind of pieces: We will not consider match reports or match previews. Opinion pieces/research pieces — stuff that add insight — are the kind we are looking for. If you can write good opinion pieces, it wouldn’t be a stretch to write a match report. So having insightful articles rather than routine match reports will be the way to go about it. Although, if you can write a really funny match report/preview then do feel free to send it in. (Of course, you have to be really sure that your piece is funny enough.)
4) Quality: We do set a high bar for quality. So language, writing style, grammar and spellings do matter. And so will be the formatting — in terms of paragraph sizes (not fancy fonts). In short, when we publish your submission, we will not have to do formatting work on it. It has to be good to go on the site.
5) Editorial vision and discretion: And finally the most important thing to note. This site was set up as a fan blog for Manchester United. While the comments section does allow freedom of opinions, there is an editorial vision as far as content goes on the main blog. While I may not necessarily have to agree with what goes on the main blog, I will not give posts that reek of venom about the club/players much space. Insightful reasoning about the team’s deficiencies can be acceptable, but extremely abrasive tone that attempts to hide behind supposed excuses like “this is a rant site” and “freedom of speech” will not work here. If there is unreasonable venom, and we define what is “unreasonable” here then it will not be published and we do not have to offer any explanation. Constructive criticism is allowed — the rest is upto your skill as a writer to be able to warp the criticism in a level headed manner.
6) Relevance: An ammendment/additional rule, this. We want your pieces to be relevant when it goes to print. While timeless pieces such as an ode to a player — past or present — or an assessment of United squads would work, make sure that if you are sending a piece you’ve written a few aeons ago, the references used in the post wouldn’t sound out of place today. In short, we’d prefer fresh pieces but if there are articles that can be relevant to date, then it’ll work. I hope this makes sense.
The posts will be published if they meet our criteria, and will be decided by an independent panel. So don’t send me emails if your entry doesn’t cut it. We will look to run this competition for a month from today. We may extend it if we receive more worthy entries.
To send your posts, use the contact form or alternatively, send them to redrants [at] gmail [dot] com. For the technologically challenged, replace [at] with @ and [dot] with . — your subject line should be titled “Red Rants Writing Competition”. You can either attach your piece as a txt file or put it in the body of the email with the article title. Do remember to let us know your name — if you want an alias to sign off your article with or your real name.
