3 tips and 5 tips for writing good articles

Introduction to technical articles need solid experience accumulation, deep thinking, and the spirit of excellence. These skills are hoped to be the icing on the cake.

Author | Shuanghong
Source | Alibaba Technical Official Account

My name is Shuanghong, and I am responsible for the content operation of Alibaba's internal technical community, including daily headline hot topic recommendation and the planning and landing of major topic selection activities. I take this opportunity to share the polishing skills of a good article with you.

Let me emphasize that what technical articles need most is a solid accumulation of experience, in-depth thinking, and a spirit of excellence. These skills are hoped to be the icing on the cake.
 

1. Three ways of planning the layout of the article:

1. A sense of object

Whether an article is a good article is not only how good your information is, but more importantly, whether your readers get something useful to him. Before you start writing, you must first think about who is this article for? Who do you want to see? What kind of gain do you hope he has?

There is a simple way of thinking. Turn off the computer. Suppose you are sitting across from a technical classmate (you can directly bring a colleague who has worked in a different department to talk in person). He has a certain technical background, but he is not the same as you. A BU, how do you make it clear and let him understand the theme you want to express in this article, your logical framework, and your conclusion. Speaking clearly, the article structure has basically taken shape.

2. Value

Famous business consultant and best-selling author Liu Run said that articles are divided into three categories: WHAT (what), WHY (why), HOW (how to do). It is relatively easy to write the WHAT category, explaining the concept: "what is sunk cost"; writing WHY column is a lot more difficult, contact motivation: I "why" to understand sunk cost; writing HOW column is relatively difficult, practical application: in the end "What to do", I can take advantage of the sunk costs and benefit from it. WHY is more valuable than WHAT; HOW is more valuable than WHY. Before writing, you have to think clearly whether you want to give WHAT or WHY in this article, or let the students get HOW. Don't be too greedy, just state clearly the value of one technical solution, one project progress, and one sub-field at a time.

In addition, you have to ponder and find ways to establish relevance to the reader. Think about it, besides being useful to your team, what is the value of your technology to other teams. What is the value for students who do not understand technology? Find a way to establish the relevance between content and readers. For example, if you want everyone to understand the charm of architecture/algorithm, if you can improve it to its extended thinking and ability system, then most technical students will benefit from it.

3. Structure

An excellent article requires a clear main line of content and logical context. It is necessary to find a way to make readers "initiate understanding" instead of simply expressing the satisfaction of their desires. One idea that can be tried is to define the problem first at the beginning. This article mainly solves what kind of problems, what are the pain points, how the previous solutions were designed, and what is the difference between the current technical solutions and the previous ones? What is the reference value for students from other technical lines? Here is a reminder that students prefer to see the thinking and analysis behind the plan, and other relevant teams can learn from the reused part. The greater the value of in-depth thinking and reference, the more popular it is.

2. Five tips for specific writing:

1. A good title is the first step to a good article

There are many students who write articles very well, but they are too lazy to think about the title. This is really not worth the gain. A good title is an essential element of a good article.

Here are a few principles for your reference. The first one is the law of numbers. When the human brain and visual system process numbers, it is much better than complex text. If you have the brighter numbers in your article, Please remember to put them on the title for the amount, ranking, and main points. It will make people feel that the information content is relatively high. The second is to directly give conclusions/values in an easy-to-understand manner, avoiding rare and professional vocabulary. A title that can be understood by ordinary people and professionals is a good title. The third is to build curiosity. We must find ways to make readers interested and establish the relevance between content and audience.

Look at the titles of these popular articles:

• Summary: 3 kinds of thinking that I have learned from TL around me in the past 5 years
• What I learned from 19 major failures in 1 year
• Beware of the complexity dilemma: thinking about software complexity
• The Wufu project team tells you that data visualization can still play like this

2. Use past experience to build trust

After asking questions at the beginning of the article, it is best to introduce yourself first, who I am, what I have done in the past, and why I came to share this topic with you, so that readers can build trust with you, so that the following articles will be more convincing .

3. Set up road signs and questions to guide readers like a guide

To continue to attract readers to read, you need to be like a tour guide and continue to set up road signs in the article.
If your article is relatively long, you can tell the readers at the beginning. This article will talk about several parts. Each part uses subtitles and the first, second, and third key points to continue to lead the readers to go along with you.

There are some signpost-like introductory words, which can also be appropriately added. They can help you break the reader's original cognitive position and build curiosity and willingness to be attracted by you. Before coming to Ali, I served as the content editor of Luo Ji Siwei and Get APP, and was responsible for the overall creation and operation of several star best-selling columns of "Liu Run 5 Minutes Business School" and "Xiangshuai's Peking University Finance Course". At that time, when Luo Ji thought and polished his course, there are a few mental methods for your reference:

• You think this is the case, it is wrong; you think this thing is very simple, I tell you, in fact, there is a very complicated set of logic behind it;
• You think this thing is very complicated, but in fact it is essentially the same thing;
• You didn’t know this before, listen to me;

4. When encountering professional terms, use more examples and metaphors

It's finally time to talk about the core technical solutions, but just talk about concepts, and readers don't like to listen. If the vocabulary is too unfamiliar and too professional, the reader will simply pass it through. It is best to combine some simple and easy-to-understand cases, or some plans, pictures, and translate the terms into a language that the reader can understand.

5. Draw conclusions and highlight value

At the end of the article, remember to state all the key points clearly in one or two sentences, to strengthen readers to take away the concepts, solutions, and technical thinking that are directly used, and to help readers hold the sense of value firmly in their hands.
Let’s share it here first, and let’s talk about the creation logic of systematic thematic content and the creation of the personal influence of dots, lines and faces.

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Some tips for programmers to write good technical articles

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