 Hey there foundation staff, Sherm here. Welcome to Sherm's Declassified Skip Survival Guide. Today, we're gonna cover one of the most fundamental topics to our community, how to write an SCP. First and foremost, I am adapting from, summarizing, and sometimes straight-up lifting text from the wonderfully thorough how to write an SCP guide on the wiki. It is brilliant. Go read it. It is very long, so consider this an introduction to concepts covered. But seriously, if you want to be a good writer, it's assumed you should also be a good reader. Go read the whole thing. Link in the description and whatnot. To start, you should have a bare minimum of three things with an additional optional fourth. Number one, an idea for an anomaly. You can get ideas from anywhere. Things that scare you, things that trip you out, creepy pictures, funny pictures, everything could be an idea if you looked at it from the right angle. Sidebar? Probably don't try to say, oh, I saw this awesome character from a show and they're an SCP now. That's probably not gonna fly. Pop culture is barely off limits. Number two, reasonable containment procedures. Remember that the foundation motto is secure, contain, and protect, not destroy, destroy, and destroy. We want to study these things, not get rid of them. We also aren't monsters, uh, well, most of the time. I'm sorry, 231-7. So we will give reasonable amenities to humanoid SCPs, so we don't blow up the on-site shrinks budget. Last but not least, don't blow the containment budget on useless minutiae. Not everything needs on-site nukes or exacting specifications to contain them. If you think it does, make sure you justify why those things are necessary. Number three, a description. And here's where we get to talk about technical writing and clinical tone. When I say technical writing, I mean that many articles on the wiki get downloaded to deletion immediately because the writer didn't bother to spell check, use proper grammar, or even make complete sentences. Don't be that kind of author. Write your article, leave it alone for a day, come back and see if you can find any errors and clean it up. If you can't find any, send it to a friend or put it in the drafts form to get some outside critique. If you wouldn't get an A in writing class for it, it won't survive on the wiki. Regarding clinical tone. A standard SCP document is written from the perspective of an SCP researcher, and our researchers are chosen because of their exceptional professional aptitude. They would not put fart jokes in a technical document, and neither should you. You also shouldn't write this like a horror novel using oodles of adjectives. One of the biggest charms of the SCP style is how we hide the horror behind a veneer of plain descriptions because we see this all the time and it ain't no thing. A great example from the style guide, if describing a werewolf, you should not write, The entity is a ten foot tall wolf man with glowing crimson eyes and teeth like Deckers. It's howls and shivers down your spine as if you instinctively know that we are its prey. Instead, write something like, The entity is a caned biped approximately three meters in length. It has luminescent red eyes and prominent incisors. Its vocalizations universally trigger a fear reflex in human subjects. Number four, a bee story. This one is optional, but as the site has evolved, it seems to be the big trend. Looking back on series one, there are many articles that are, this is an anomaly, what acts weird, and that's weird to us, so let's keep it in a box. And that's it. But from series two onwards, having a story to tell besides, we found a weird thing that does a weird thing is typically the norm. The bee story can be related to how your object was created, who created your object, what your object is attempting to do when it gets loose, what it was doing when you found it, anything really as long as it is interesting. This can be weaved throughout your containment and description sections and can be expended upon with test logs, recovered journals, exploration logs, recovery logs, etc. I'm not saying you need any of those extra bits at all. You just need to do as much as it takes to make your story clear and interesting. As a personal example, the SCP I wrote started with the main section and two addendums, but expanded to six addendums as extra bits of story grew organically. Alright, so now you have the base four things you need to write in SCP. I'm going to take a very abridged look at some extra details that will help round out your SCP writing experience. Again, for more tips, go read the main guy, dang it. First Timer's Rule Make sure your SCP can be understood by someone if it were their first visit to the site. We want to welcome more people to the fan base after all. Censorship Redactions, data expunged, and black boxes should be used to create mystery and draw your reader in, or used to cut out irrelevant data such as names, dates, or times the way that a secretive organization would likely do. Always make sure that you know what's behind the censorship. Don't just block it out so you don't have to write something. We can tell. Also, never censor any of your containment procedures. How are we supposed to contain it if you don't tell us how? Measurements. The Foundation uses the international system of units, so don't measure in feet or inches you dirty Americans. Signed, a dirty American. Danger Level Making something super gory or the most dangerous thing ever doesn't automatically make it interesting. You can make a universe-ending entity that drowns us all in pig-grizzle, but you have to write it in an interesting way. Cross-linking. Do it. It's a great way to enter RIVAR universe. Just get permission from the author of the article that you want to cross-link to, and as a site preference, try linking to non-series one articles if you can. There are so many more than just those first thousand articles. Show some love, huh? And this brings me to my final tip, which is also a tip for writing in general. There are no 100% unbreakable rules to writing. When done well, you can break one or all of the rules I've just laid out and make a good article if you write it well. Some of the best articles on the wiki play with the format in interesting ways, and you can do that too provided you put in the study and the work. After all, you have to understand the rules before you are capable of breaking them in interesting ways. Whew, we made it. If you want to throw your own writing tips in the comments, please do so. We'll get into more detail guides about certain subjects later on, so go ahead and request one if you like. Thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Sherm's Declassified Skip Survival Guide. If you like what we're doing on the channel, do that like, share, and subscribe Mumbo Jumbo, and if you really like what's going on around here, hit up the Site 42 Patreon or the Site 42 Store and support the channel that way. See you next time, Foundation staff.