Writing Tips for VoyageForum Guides

Style Tips

The VF team is here to refine the format of texts if needed. Nevertheless, we recommend everyone follow a few basic writing principles:

• All contributions must be in French.

• Keep your style simple and direct with short sentences and, if possible, quality French.

• Choose short and clear titles.

• Don’t hesitate to use line breaks, sections, and sub-sections to make your text more readable.

• Write normally, not in shorthand or SMS language. Avoid acronyms (e.g., LOL), emoticons, and other SMS symbols. Similarly, avoid words—let alone entire texts—in capital letters.

• For spelling, proofread your work and/or use the built-in spell checker, which underlines words it considers incorrect in red.

• Before you start, browse through the various guides to familiarise yourself with them, both in terms of style and content.

Content Tips

By definition, every contribution should be personal. Do not copy any text that is under copyright, especially from guidebooks or other travel publications. In such cases, you would be legally responsible to their authors.

VoyageForum guides aim to be practical and usable by everyone. Contributions should therefore focus on providing information or descriptions rather than narrating a journey. In short, this is not the best place for a travel journal.

No advertising, promotion, product sales, or service offers are allowed in the guides. We thank you for respecting this rule.

Practical Details

Clearly Define Your Topic

A point often overlooked when writing is that while you may know the places and things you’re talking about, your readers may not. It’s important to always contextualise what you’re discussing in your contributions. The easiest way to do this is to put yourself in the shoes of someone with no prior knowledge of the subject.

A Guide Is Not a Travelogue

Unless you present part of your contribution as a personal account (text in quotation marks and/or italics), a guide should not be written in the first person or recount only personal experiences.

The focus is on collective knowledge, and your own experience should be viewed with some perspective and considered more broadly. In short: "I experienced it this way, but is this truly representative for most people? What can I take from my experience that applies to others?"

Prices and Currencies

Another important aspect of guides is indicating prices and the currency in which they are expressed. This can be tricky, especially given VoyageForum’s diverse audience—including Quebecois, Swiss, and French readers, each with their own currency.

In principle, it’s useful to include a price for any service, even if it’s approximate. This will give readers a better idea than simply stating something is "expensive" or "cheap." For accommodations, specify whether the price is per person or per room (preferably). The same goes for chartered transport: per person or per vehicle (preferably). In short, be precise so everyone can make the most of the information.

As for currency, while you can mention prices in the local currency, it’s helpful to also provide an equivalent in euros (or US dollars as a secondary option), for example in parentheses. There’s no need to specify amounts down to the cent; rounding or approximating is fine. The goal, as mentioned, is to give readers a general idea in a familiar currency.

Neutral or Not Neutral?

This is an eternal question when it comes to writing travel guides, regardless of the medium.

While neutrality offers a certain consensus, it has the drawback of often resulting in a "tourist office brochure" style. Everything is overly positive, making it hard to get a real sense of the situation. In travel—as in many areas—things are rarely that simple. Places, sites, and services vary greatly in interest, and travel isn’t equally easy everywhere. It’s better to be clear about this, while maintaining some perspective. For example, if a place seems uninteresting to one type of traveller, it might suit another perfectly. The most common example of this is beach resorts or all-inclusive packages.

If you disagree with an opinion, rather than deleting it, add a complementary perspective without starting an endless discussion. This is why some articles (particularly those related to accommodation) include spaces for different viewpoints to be expressed.

Finally, a few (rare) articles may sometimes be closed to contributions. This could be because they relate strictly to the guides’ functioning and don’t require input (e.g., instructions) or because a topic or article has become too controversial (due to current events, for example). These closures may be temporary and are decided solely by the VoyageForum team.

About Links

You can create internal or external links in any article. An internal link refers to another guide article, while an external link points to another website.

If part of your topic is already covered elsewhere on VoyageForum, rather than repeating it, it’s better to create an internal link to the relevant article. We encourage this type of internal linking in the guides.

For external links allowed in VoyageForum Guides, they must aim to inform and complement the page content, never to advertise or re-offer what’s already on the site. Generally, "official" links (e.g., a city’s official website rather than another site about that city) should be prioritised. There are several categories of external links in the guides.

Encyclopaedic Links:

This refers to anything not directly related to travel, side topics, or subjects unlikely to have contributions but where additional information might be useful. This includes cultural, historical, socio-political, and economic references, as well as events or well-known figures. Unless you expand or create a new article, the solution is to link to an external page or site that explains the specific point in detail. Wikipedia is a logical choice in such cases.

Named Links:

When an article includes a chapter or detailed discussion about a specific "travel actor" (e.g., an airline), a city, a museum, a monument, or a particular site, and that entity has an official website, you can link to it.

Other Links:

Some sites provide highly specific information that VoyageForum will never cover, such as daily weather, transport schedules, or exchange rates. It’s also possible to include links to these.

Notes and References

"Notes and references" are additional pieces of information that don’t need to be directly integrated into the contribution or the VoyageForum Guides. They may include:

• A digression that goes beyond the topic or runs parallel to it.

• A brief complement or comment on the theme.

• A bibliographic source for the information.

• A mini-review of press or web sources covering the same topic.

These notes and references appear at the bottom of some guide articles and are indicated in the text by a number in brackets[1].

Photos and Illustrations

Currently, contributors cannot add photos to articles for technical reasons. This will be possible in a future version of VoyageForum Guides. The few illustrations in this initial version were uploaded directly by the VF team.

Role of the VF Team

Like the forums, VoyageForum Guides have a moderation and validation team. Their primary role is to ensure there are no abuses or vandalism in contributions. They may also intervene on the form of contributions (particularly spelling) and occasionally edit texts and layouts to ensure a consistent reading experience for visitors.

If necessary, after verifying with various sources, they may also correct certain errors.