DEV Community

Discussion on: How to Write a good Dev.to post?

Collapse
 
v6 profile image
πŸ¦„N BπŸ›‘ • Edited

// , I can give you a few tips that I think have helped me. I don't really get much feedback on my writing style, aside from the occasional "Why? Why did you do this to us?", but, in the spirit of "I think I've got this," I think I've got this.

Tip number 1: Include examples. Examples help people to understand things, because they give us the chance to generalize, rather than relying on you to generalize for us.

Tip number 2: Don't get too sad if no one reads what you are writing. If you want to be famous, go on Twitter and say woke things until someone criticizes you.

Tip number 3: Some kind of picture can help, especially if it's funny, for people like me who are easily amused.

Tip number 4: Whatever your sense of humor is, whether it's puns, wry satire, or silly stories, it's possible to show that humor without getting in the way of precise technical points. Also, see Tip number 7.

Tip number 5: If you have some kind of epic, huge journey the reader should take, it miiiiiiiiiight help to make it a series, rather than writing a booklet in a single blog post.

Tip number 6: For interactive stuff, set conditions for engagement. This not only reduces the unavoidable "No ur rong" responses, it also gives people who might disagree with you a way to get around their writer's block. Fun fact: People knowledgeable on a subject are more likely to get writer's block when faced with something they disagree on, especially if they're the civil type.

E.g. for to stimulate a hearty Rust flamewar, "If you want to respond with a rejoinder, please include your least hated and most hated library, what it was that made you hate the Rust language, and the most complex thing you ever made with it (or tried to make)."

Tip number 7: Do you own your data, and your platform? Back up your posts in case you get kicked off of Dev.to. They can exercise their editorial privilege/delete deplatform your stuff if they decide they don't like what you post, man, especially if you follow Tip number 4. Every post is an offensive post if you try hard and believe in yourself. Plus, one of the great things about dev.to is that the devs made it easy to set up canonical URLs and get your own self-hosted blog going.