It seems that a lot of the articles are rather poorly written around here. Since I kinda have this thing against bad literature, I bring you, Muz's Guide to Writing a Good Article.


Use proper writing techniques
I can't stress this more. There's plenty of good articles out there that would deserve a 4 or 5 star rating, but get only about a 0-2 just because it looks crappy. For God's sake, just spellcheck it.

If you're too lazy to type right or have bad English, just copy & paste it into MS Word, get it to spell/grammar check & fix it, then C&P it back here.

And remember those English lessons at school. Write short paragraphs and keep your sentences short. The longer it is, the more likely people are to get confused. The more confused people are, the more likely they are to give you low ratings and misunderstand you.

For the smarter ones among you, try to keep the big words like "philantropy" and "globalization" down. These are children/teenagers/unemployed people/retired old ladies you're addressing. And many of them don't even come from an English-speaking country.


Don't ramble
If it has nothing to do with what you're gonna say, don't bother typing it. Not many care. Maybe Muz does and a few others, but you'll likely stray off the topic and forget what you were saying in the first place. It happens more often than you think. And it often doesn't get you much respect, even if you really did sleep with Britney Spears that day you bumped into her at Sir Elton John's house party.

If you must ramble, keep it contained. Tell people when the rambling starts and when it stops. Use these little title-like thingies Muz uses.


Emphasize on what's important
Everyone's "busy" these days. Not many would have the time to read an article from start to finish. If you write a bland article with no emphasis, people tend to get the wrong point. It happens waaay too often if you do emphasize your point.

Learn HTML. I could explain it all, but it's a bother trying to get the tags to look right on the page. Make use of the bold and italic ones. I'm not sure if the code tags SC recently introduced work, but they're good when you're trying to explain an event.

And as a general rule, italics for examples/conditions/actions and bolds for titles.


Don't over-emphasize
The less often you use your tags the more effect they have. If you want an example, just look at spam and legal contracts . They emphasize everything and make it all look messy.


Beware of smileys
Careful not to use the ":" key too often. And try to stay from putting something (like the number 8 ) just behind a bracket. Heck, just try to avoid them brackets.


If you can, jot it elsewhere
As most of you probably know by now, the most annoying thing ever is to work so long on something only to have it wiped out by a single lightning bolt or a glitch in Microsoft's coding.

So just jot your article when you've got spare time or working on a game and have an idea. Besides, if you jot it down elsewhere, you can re-read it and see your mistakes. TDC's little edit box usually doesn't suffice.

Nobody likes a half-arsed article.


Edit
Last, but certainly not least, use the edit button. People don't seem to notice that it's there. It's far better than correcting a typo in a comment that people may never see. And it keeps you from having to say, "That was supposed to be a 8!"

If you want, you might even consider editing your articles to make certain critics look like they're talking about some other article.