Editorial Standards

We employ the Reasonable Person standard and the US First Amendment principle. If it is legal speech and within the bounds of a common-sense Englishman’s thought, you’re within your rights to say it. However, do not complain we limited your freedom of speech because you attempted to intellectually link Flat Earth theory with immigration statistics, or wasted 5,000 words arguing England would be better off as a communist utopia.

To submit a piece, email [email protected]. We will reply promptly and courteously within forty-eight hours, with a candid yes., or no.

You can, and must, speak freely. But as an Englishman, you will uphold your savoir faire and abide by reputable standards of propriety.

House Rules

1. You do not have to use your real name and can write pseudonymously, but make contact with an editor first.
2. You, the contributor, retain the copyright over your work. You agree to allow us commercial usage of it under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA standard license for a period of five years.
3. Original work only. We do not accept work which has been previously published elsewhere without explicit permission.
4. Ensure your work contains no spelling mistakes. Use a spellchecker.
5. Ensure the quality of your writing is high, particularly your grammar: run it through tools such as ProWritingAid, Grammarly, and Hemingway. Remove adverbs, and words such as "that" and "very."
6. Do not use pretentious jargon, vacuous buzzwords, or fashionable Californian self-help talk. “Narrative” is an adjective, not an abstract noun. England does not have abstract "values," it is a people with ancient customs and traditions.
7. Use a thesaurus to augment your vocabulary if it is poor. Do not pepper your prose with lazy cliché verbs such as "align."
8. Look up the following: aphorism, apothegm, axiom, fallacy, figuratively, idiom, lemma, literally, and maxim.
9. Triple-check your numbers and calculations are correct. Cite their origin and be transparent with your working.
10. Cite your sources when making general factual claims and ensure they are credible. Research tools like ChatGPT are prone to hallucinating imaginary references. Avoid blind sources wherever feasible.
11. If you are including quotes (historical or otherwise), double-check they are authentic and not misattributed.
12. Write like an Englishman. Do not submit American AI-generated slop from the aforementioned ChatGPT.
13. Do not plagiarise from other articles, blogs, or literary material. Doing so will provoke serious consequences.
14. Opposing or adversarial opinions are fine, but must make non-fallacious arguments of a high standard in a thoughtful polemic tone which edify the reader.
15. If you’re courting controversy and plan to flirt close to the line, check in with an editor first.
16. If you’re going to insult someone or something, do it with aplomb and make it witty.
17. Your work may be vetoed or embargoed while we request fixes which resolve specific issues of quality, accuracy, or legality. 
18. If a correction is required post-publication, we may make it ourselves if we cannot get a response from you first.

Orwell’s 6 Rules

From “Politics and the English Language”:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.