How to write a good guide

How to write a good guide

Lately I've seen a few guides that could need some fixing on different parts. I'm therefore writing this guide to help people making good guides.

There's a few things to remember when writing, and preparing for writing, a guide.

Things to remember

• Topic
• Layout
• Grammar
• Detail

I'll now describe each part more detailed, how to do it, why, and other handy tips.


Topic

First off, it's the topic. It's actually pretty self explaining what this is about, but I'll try tell you how to find a good topic. There's some ways to find a topic to write about, it should be easy enough to understand, but some people find this as the hardest part.

Your knowledge
Where's your knowledge? All people got more knowledge than others on something. What do you do you do on your spare time? Do you play golf? Do you sail? Do you play football? Is it something that interests you that may interest others?
All these are questions who should help you think, you don't have to (but can of course) write about one of these subjects.

Get inspired!
There's plenty of places where you can go look for inspiration writing guides. The nearest place would of course be the Help and Requests section, you could also visit Tech Support to see what other people needs help with. Sometimes even going a round outside and watch things helps you think.

If you ever have done something, that you found tricky, and had to research some (not just a simple Google search) to figure out how to do it you could write about that!


Layout

Then we've come to the layout. The layout is important to make the reader a relaxed feeling when reading your guide. Most people read a lot slower when reading on a screen than in a magazine/book. There are two main things to remember when making the layout; images and the visual styling.

Images
Some say that an image says more than a thousand words. I'm not sure if it's actually that much, but what is certain is that an image makes your guide much easier to understand.

An image has basically two effects.

The first, and maybe most important thing is to make your guide easier to understand. For instance, instead of saying "Click on the little button with the scanlines", you could use an image, and say "Click on this button".



The second effect is to make your guide more separated, and give people something to rest his/her eyes at for a few moments. If your guide doesn't require any images, use some anyway. It makes it a lot easier to read.

Visual styling
Sythe supports a lot of text formats, use them!

1. These are the bold, italic and underlined text formats. Bold can be used for titles and highlights. Italic is also used for highlights. Underlined is actually also used for highlights, but this is perhaps more highlighted than bold and italic.
2. This one places all the text in the center. Some people like doing this with their whole guide.
3. Here you can select the size of your text. Use a bigger size (3-4) on titles.
4. These two are used when listing up things. Either with dots, or numbers.
5. I'm not that good on this one, using colors. But they are mostly used on titles. Try use calm colors, not like red, yellow or magenta.
6. This one is used to give links to your text. Mark the text you want linked, and press the button. Then enter the link in the little popup that appears.
7. This one is to insert images. Go where you want the image in the text, and press the button. Then enter the image's URL in the little popup that arrives.

Grammar

To use correct grammar is important when writing a guide. First, it's from what you can remember on your own. Then I mean the difference between you and u, it's and its, and so on.

Second way to achieve good grammar in your guide is to use a dictionary. The easiest way to do this would probably to use a web browser that supports dictionaries. I know that Firefox have a lot of dictionary addons, Opera have some pre-installed, and Google Chrome have also got some pre-installed.


Detail

When writing your guide, imagine your writing it to someone who's really dumb. Remember to explain everything correctly, and as detailed as possible. Don't skip anything. Well, of course, don't write like "move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse". But I'm sure you'll understand that.


That's actually it. If you need more advice, feel free to ask. If you think something's missing in this guide, you can just leave me a PM or post about it here.

 

Great Guide! I would say this is similar to my guide on how to make more professional threads, but this is more directed towards guides rather than service threads and such. I would say you did a very good job with this guide.

 

This is a pretty good guides, although you could have gone into much more detail about things... For example, you could have gone more into how to organize your guide in the layout section. You also should mention something about breaking your text up and not just having a large block of text, which is a very common issue that I see.

You also need to learn to indent for crying out loud! You have organized the guide into sections with subsections, but you have not indented at all, which is a universal way of moving to a subtopic.

 

Alright. I'll fix that tomorrow.
Thanks for your feedback.