Introduction Welcome to my guide to writing guides. This guide can be for those beginners or even more advanced writers looking at others' opinions and styles. I just want to share my ideas and tips to everybody of this community. I. Introduction II. Questions: "What is a guide?", "When do you write a guide?", & "Why write a guide?" III. The Text IV. The Visuals V. Quality NOT [strike]Quantity[/strike] VI. Style What is a guide? A guide is a post/thread here in the forum that shares one's knowledge and thoughts about a topic with the community. It is also considered a good act to write an ORIGINAL good guide (you will learn in this guide ) that shows you are willing to share your own knowledge to help the members of the forum. When do you write a guide? Before writing a guide, you want to look for other members that may have already posted a guide on the topic you were planning to write about. If you see that that guide is missing some important information, you might want to write a guide of your own that includes everything! If there isn't a guide on your planned topic, even better ! Why write a guide? It is up to you whether to write a guide or not. Writing a guide is your choice, for your own reasons. Whether it is just good from your heart, +rep, +cash, or for the Content Contributor Award. The Text The text is usually your main form of explanation and communication with the reader. It needs to be very straightfoward, clear, and ellaborating. What I mean by ellaborating is going on to explain in detail what you just said, like I'm doing now. When you write a good guide, you usually write more than you planned. It helps make the reader 100% clear of what you're getting at. Hey, and don't try to make a guide in one day because it most likely won't be as thorough and high-quality as you want it to be. Usually, you want it to be revised several times before you make it. Also, humor is good in guides if it fits; some guides don't work well with humor. Even some smilies The Visuals Visuals are very important. Remember, pictures can equal a thousand words or more. Pictures can be used to describe what words (or too many words) can't. Make the point of the visual very clear by highlighting what needs to be mainly looked at by the reader. Have these whenever you can because it really helps clear up things. Or, you can even write a whole guide without words, just PICTURES! Yeah, a lot of work, but trust me, very rewarding Quality NOT [strike]Quantity[/strike] When you are writing guides, don't think about making more than the one you are on. It doesn't matter about how many guides you make, it matters how good they are. They best situation is quality & quantity living happily ever after, but that is fairy tales :X: . I'd say: 1 high-quality guide > 999,999,999,999,999,999,999 bad guides. You'd probably get better rewards with the one quality guide anyways. Also, the outstanding guides that you want to write does not happen in a day. Even for me, my typing speed averages at 100 wpm, takes me about a week to write one of my long, better guides. Style This matters from person to person, but there are several keys and several do's and don't's. It is important that your design is simple. You don't need rainbow-colored text. For me, I like bold, underline, one-color title with plain text. More text sizes, to me, is better than too many colors. Also, try to avoid really bright colors that are unreadable for your text (or just avoid colors altogether for your text). Titles, you can make a little more fancy. Using some bold, italics, underline, and strike in your text would be good too. It's also important to develop your own style and format, and if it looks good for you, it'll probably look good for us. Basic skeleton for your format: -Introduction -Table of Contents -Conclusion -Credits Buttons! Buttons are important when it comes to guides. Here are them, and their good uses: -Preview: This is good for looking at how far along your guide is doing, and how your design is. It also helps you take a final look before you post. -Save/Load: These buttons are important. If you plan on sleeping or doing activities between sessions at the computer, these would be very useful. It usually takes me many days to complete one guide, seeing the length of them. For that reason, I use the Save/Load buttons A LOT! -Submit: This is a tempting button, and you should press it only when you know you are 100% ready and satisfied with your guide. This is like presenting your work and released to the public. -Edit: This button is available when you have posted your guide. It is when you are looking over your completed guide and find a mistake. This may also be used if another member spots a mistake that you made. Conclusion I know, not the super-long guide that you expected. I just had some stuff that I wanted to share, and I just have some final words. Just let the guide flow from your fingers, that's how my guides come to me. Hope you guys liked it Credits lightningstalon (just me )
Very well done but for some reason my brain tells me I seen something like this around before but so far cant seem to find anything under search.. anywhoo Its very well done and organized ^^ Did you have a guide like this out before and this just updated?
Ugh, no, I haven't...yeah, I think I said that I've seen these around, but I just wanted to share what I knew, I guess. I mean, I really didn't mean to copy somebody else's guide or try to "replace" it...
So did you take a week to write this guide xD No pictures :O Anyway jokes aside, good effort put into this guide. You could also talk about centralising of text or aligning to the left, like explain which alignment is good for different guides or something. +rep!
Oh, bleh, I forgot about that I swear I was going to...it didn't take me a week, actually. It took me 3-4 days. I wrote most of it on paper because I wasn't allowed on the computer so...
Lol, actually, I don't think it requires that long to create a quality guide. As long as you include pictures and give well detailed steps, it is possible to create guides in around 3hours or less.
Well, what I meant was that it wasn't that easy. I was just saying that you need to revise a lot to make sure it's just about 100% what you want it to be. Yeah, I'll fix that part though...I can kinda see what you mean Thx... :yup: