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Published October 03, 2023
When you go to add content, you can do a quick blog-type post or a more detailed article. Here, we are going through the basic steps of writing an article, which will be more in depth than a blog post which is just expressing an idea as quickly as possible.
The first step in writing an article is to come up with an idea. This can be a simple or more complicated idea (which can turn into a topic). For a little more detail on this, visit the article How to Develop Content. You just want the idea to be in line with the overall web site vision.
For a simple idea that you wish to convey, you can just go to a keyboard and start typing. However, if your idea has several parts to it, you will want to start by doing an outline. It does not have to be a formal outline--it may just be a collection of thoughts that you want to make sure you incorporate into your article. The thing is that you want to get those thoughts down as quickly as possible to make sure they all are accounted for in the end product. My recommendation is to use pen and paper for this to work as quickly as possible. This way, they're preserved and ready for use whenever you get back to it. Also, write big and leave extra space so you can go in and add more as you come across related thoughts you wish to express (which should happen more than you realize).
Here, you want to get closer to the final stage. You want to just type and ignore spelling and such to turn your ideas into full fledged sentences. You'll be reviewing it again so don't worry about perfect at this point. Some authors will actually write down the draft on paper or type it out to print it (or use a typewriter if they have one) with the idea of the final copy being typed all over again without fixing what is already on the screen. I try do do this as much as possible, but sometimes I just want to let the words flow in as final format as possible and not have to re-type everything.
One thing you want to make sure of at this point is that every thought you had for your idea is in place so you should either follow your outline or at least review it after you've written everything to make sure you've captured everything. Another piece of advice I have for this step is to do the writing in a plain text editor or at least in word processing software that has no formatting in place. You want to get your ideas down now so pretty can wait.
Once you've written your draft article, read it from beginning to end to make sure everything flows and the words sound right together. Here is where a hard copy and a pen come in handy to mark it up before going in to fix it (of course, you can just fix it on the screen as well). If you did have edits that need to be done, go ahead and fix them and then re-read the draft from start to end again. You'll probably review it a few times. For a bonus, you may want to have a friend read it to get an outside perspective. I know that this sounds like a lot of work, but remember that good quality ideas deserve good quality representation. Your readers will appreciate it.
You'll want to look at your article at least one time with completely fresh eyes to make sure the way you had worded it in "the moment" is still the way you want to express yourself. In general, you will also want to read your old articles from time to time to make sure they're still in line with the current vision of your web site and still make sense (sometimes our thoughts change and we can always go back and edit older content to make sure it's in line with how we're perceiving things now).
Here's where you want to do one last check of your spelling. Here is also where you add any links or images that you intend to add to your article. This is also where you want to make it look pretty by changing anything that is needed, such as adding emphasis to a phrase or updating your headings with HTML markup or by doing the final edit in your chosen software. Your're just about done now!
If you did the final edit in hosted blogging software, all you need to do now is push the button to publish it. Otherwise, upload the article to your web servers and make sure that the article is linked from the main page and/or your topics page. If the users cannot find the article you have written, all the effort you had put into it would be for nothing.
To write this article, I first did a draft. You can find a scanned copy of it here. One thing to keep in mind is that I was collecting ideas for articles for a while before starting actually writing them down for publishing. It was quite a few months after I had written this draft that I typed this actual article out so I can definitely say that a good draft captures what you are intending at the time and you should be able to use it to write the article you want even after time has passed. Had I not wrote down all of my thoughts at the time, I would need to re-do the whole draft process rather than just read the draft and start typing from it. In fact, the draft I posted here is actually the second draft. The first was barely legible because I was trying to get the thoughts down so quickly.
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