Many tips and tricks on how to make amazing content.
TL;DR: Follow these experience tips to improve your technical articles.
Backgroun...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
I wonder why you listed plagiarism detectors under useful tools. If I write myself then I actually know for a fact that it's not a plagiarism ;) Could you elaborate on this one?
@katafrakt: I imagine that @mcsee might have other reasons in mind for this as well, but as an educator that sometimes requires students to use a plagiarism detector before submitting assignments, I can say that I do so because those tools aren't just about detecting plagiarism. The better ones also make automated suggestions on writing quality issues including some of Maxi's recommendations like using active voice rather than passive.
In my articles I usually add quotes (citing the author) and sometimes examples borrowed with permission (and a direct link to them).
Nevertheless I use short paragraphs and using plagarism tools helps me find similar articles.
Let's do an exercise: Write yourself a brand new short article. Then use any plagiarism tool. You will be surprised ,
It is yet another tool. It does not mean you are stealing from other people.
This is also common practice in science when publishing articles. The more publications to a certain topic the easier the chance to unintentionally plagiarize.
Exactly!
I have a master in Computer Science. Searching for previous work is mandatory.
Did the exercise. Put one of my existing shorter articles into a plagiarism tool. It found a similarity with the article itself on my blog (because it's already published) and nothing else. Unfortunately I fail to see the surprise and usefulness of this.
Ok. the article brings tips.
You can disagree with some of the tips.
We are fine.
Not all plagiarism is intentional.
So first of all I'm not sure I agree. Might be a language difference, but definitely plagiarism bears a lot of innate intentionality for me. But that aside, I understand you may want to avoid accidental similarity when writing a scientific article or something. We are talking blog posts here though, if I'm not mistaken.
Plagiarism can be broader than many people realise, as well as unintentional.
In a musical context, it's quite easy to imagine an artist coming up with a musical refrain that they think is original, but is in fact one they might have heard at some point and not recognised. In that case it would be plagiarism, although unintentional. The music industry is replete with potential examples of these. It's harder to imagine this kind of plagiarism in a blog post, though not impossible (think how many spammers replicate content from other sites for SEO gains).
There's an article at ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidanc... about possible forma of plagiarism which covers it quite well. In the context of a blog post, the most likely forms are probably cutting and pasting, paraphrasing, inaccurate citations and failure to acknowledge assistance. These are definitely things that can affect blog posts too because the source should be evaluated on its own merits and can't always be assumed to be accurate. For that reason plagiarism detection is likely to be useful when writing a blog post.
Very nice post with great suggestions. I like your use of a template in your "code smells" series. Whenever I'm reading one of those, I like knowing how it is structured and exactly where to scroll for specific types of information. Your "code smells" template reminds be a bit of the structure of a pattern from the GoF's Design Patterns book. Obviously it is a different template, but same basic idea of organization.
Yes. GOF's book amazing because of the structure and naming.
Many patters are outdated or anti-patterns now. But the structure and common terminology was ground breaking
Good tips!
I think, having a well defined structure/template to your blog gives new readers more control on the sections they want to focus, and ignore the rest. At the same time existing readers know what to expect as they are already familiar.
Great tips. I will try to follow them. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks.
👏👏👏 so many useful tips in one post!
Thank you Maxi, great advice as usual!
A few more words on avoiding drafts... you're right, sometimes I write a draft, just a few lines, and I leave it there.
When I come back after some hours/days I feel lost and I forgot the Idea I had in mind.
It would have been much better to keep the momentum while writing the short draft and expanding it immediately!
indeed!
Took me years to learn.
I had to discard about 100 "ideas" and start from scratch
How does structure relate to the content ? vashikaran mantra for love