NerdSpan Style Guide: Bios
Posted By Dr. Travis Langley on December 10, 2012
To edit your bio when you’re on your Edit User page, scroll down to the “Biographical Info” box under “About the User.”
Author Photo: If you’re a NerdSpan author, you need to provide an author photo that is actually a photo or illustration of YOU, not a picture of your breakfast, car, or favorite lolcat unless you’re clearly in the picture too. Be human.
Most contributors use photos, but a human-looking drawing is fine. This illustration by David Mack is an excerpt from a comic in which Mack surprised Tommy Cash by including Tommy in a story. That makes for one heck of an author image, and we’re happy to show it off.
The Bio Itself: Your bio should probably be three or four sentences long, but not a whole essay that your readers will get tired of seeing every time they read one of your articles. Sentences! Don’t just list bits and pieces of information, at least not until the end of your bio. Write it in third person. Overuse of first person is too blog-like. You can show personality without being too informal.
End the bio with contact info (e.g., Twitter or Facebook page, but not your email or you’ll get spammed), location, and favorite movie/author/book/hero/something relevant to the main topics you’ll cover for NerdSpan. Location can be as specific as Dallas, Texas, or as general as South America. Just be truthful with it (so don’t say Narnia or Gotham City). We’ll have readers and contributors all over the world, and we want them to know where you’re coming from – for example, why one writer uses American spellings while another uses British.
The following example is probably too long for most of you, but if you have credentials as strong as Katrina’s, hey, show them off.
Action Flick Chick Katrina Hill, author of the book Action Movie Freak, learned to appreciate all things action at a young age by sneaking into the room while her two older brothers watched action movies and horror. At ActionFlickChick.com, she shares her love of these films with everyone, along with interviews, views, news, and whatever else she happens to choose. G4TV crowned her their official Next Woman of the Web champion. Katrina writes for Fanhattan, Arcade Sushi, and MTV Geek. She and her avatar star in “The Action Chick” webcomic. Katrina created and stars in the “Geeks and Gamers Anonymous” webseries. Twitter: @ActionChick. Location: Dallas, Texas. Favorite Movie: Tremors (1990).
As with all our guidelines, this is subject to change.
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