Style Guidelines

Please note that these points are exactly what it says above: Guidelines. They aren’t immutable laws. Every cat is different, so we don’t expect every cat to have a standard “cookie-cutter” profile. Please use your imagination and write in whatever style and voice you think would give them an appropriate personality.

You will be able to find the basic information we have for a cat here: https://catituderescue.com/needs-a-bio

Ok...the guide.

• We would prefer the profiles to be written in the first person, as you would a dating profile for a person. Apparently. However, it’s not always appropriate, especially if the cat has had a lot of third-party involvement in their life. For example, we might want to emphasise how many people gave up their time to trap them, or how wonderful people have scooped them up from one place and driven them for hours to another. In those sorts of cases, writing about them in the third person makes more sense.
• You can absolutely break the fourth wall if you like. For example, I’m a sucker for including terrible dad jokes in their first-person profile and then writing, “Chris thinks he’s hilarious, but I’ve told him to get a life”. Don’t judge me.
• Try to adapt the voice of the profile to suit the age of the cat. You are more than welcome to include some kiddy-speak for a tiny kitten, text-speak and school slang for a teenage cat (“innit”), or rather stiff grammatically correct phrases for an older gentleman. If you’re not sure about the equivalent age of a cat, we have a guide on the site here: https://catituderescue.com/advice/general-advice/age-of-cat-in-human-years
• Equally, a cat that has survived several years on the mean streets of Braintree won’t talk like a 6-month kitten that has only known an indoor life in a lovely country cottage. Don’t make it unintelligible, and don’t go too over the top with it. But some judicious targeted styling won’t hurt to give their profile a bit of personality.  
• Please don’t overuse exclamation marks. I’m terrible for this! See? I find that I have to remove about 75% of them before I post anything. Your mileage my differ, but if in doubt, take them out. Also, try not to use multiple exclamation marks. As Terry Pratchett said “Multiple exclamation marks…are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” If you really must, once is probably enough in any one cat’s profile.
• If you are going to use AI, please only use it to spell check your final piece. It can be a great tool, but all the profiles start to sound the same. Endless adjectives, this-but-not-that phrases, American spellings, and don’t get me started on em dashes without spacing instead of hyphens. Once you know what you are looking for, you can spot AI generated text from a mile away. We really want to hear the voice you have chosen for the cat, not ChatGPT’s voice.  
• You don’t have to be grammatically correct. Feel free to use a preposition to end a sentence with. See what I did there? Crap wasn’t it. Write how you (or you think a cat) would speak. It’s a dating profile, not an essay.
• Please do spell check your profile though. For some reason, after decades behind a keyboard and night classes learning to use a typewriter, I still write “teh” more than I write “the”. If I get abducted by aliens and replaced with a doppelganger, this will be the test you can use to differentiate between the two.
• Feel free to put a bit of humour into your profile. We know that all the cats will have a sad backstory or they wouldn’t be looking for new home, but there’s nothing worse than scrolling down our Facebook feed or paging through our site and just reading endless “family torn apart” sob stories. A bit of light and shade doesn’t go amiss.
• The above notwithstanding, we are at home to a bit of “schmaltz”. I am anyway. If you can get your reader to tear up occasionally, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just don’t overdo it or it comes across as false and forced. For example, if their story began gloriously happily and then fell apart, you can apply a thick layer of emotion-lotion in that second act. You know the sort of thing: “Suddenly I was thrown out into the garden” or “My lovely humans couldn’t look after me anymore”. But at least give them a potentially happy third act: “All at once I was rescued by a lovely person, and now I’m safe again in foster looking for my new forever home” or “One day I was scooped off the streets and had my first belly full of food in years and a soft bed in my foster home”. Unrelenting misery is not an easy sell. Even if you are an aging Emo.

Chris, the Web Guy