Advice needed on writing articles?

["Geoff Hart" <Geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

Cassandra Parker needs <<...to get some information on 
writing articles.  I have to start writing a small article for my 
company/department telling what's going on within our area, 
what's new, what' s hot, etc.>>

You didn't mention whether this is a standalone piece of 
paper that will exist on its own, or whether it will fill space in 
a company newsletter. If the latter, you'll need to discuss the 
goals of the articles with the editor and arrive at an 
understanding of how the two of you can work together (e.g., 
re. style, content, length).

If you're doing this on your own, as a kind of in-house 
bulletin, you'll have to keep in mind that the audience will 
likely have even less motivation to read it than our users have 
to read our manuals. That leads to the first question you have 
to answer: "what's in it for us, and how can you convince us, 
before we've even begun reading, that we _want_ to start 
reading?" That suggests the layout must be open and inviting, 
with white space and illustrations so that it doesn't look like a 
bland wall of technical text. Use a large font size (and 
nonstandard typeface) for the heading, and pick some 
intriguing wording: rather than "the correct use of bullets in 
PowerPoint", try "Keep your audience's attention using 
bullets!". Get them to look twice, and you're halfway to 
getting them to read the article.

The need to seduce people into reading also means you'll 
have to cut down on the text, so they stay seduced and stick it 
out to the end. That suggests informal language, and a 
discussion of the issue, rather than a list of procedural steps; 
after all, who wants to read another manual? We hardly read 
the ones we've already got! The 5W's (who, what, when, 
where, and why) are very important: an article should answer 
each question for your audience. Pick topics that will be 
interesting, and explain them simply, in simple language. 
How do you know what will be interesting? Talk to people, 
and make sure to provide a "please send us suggestions for 
articles" boilerplate at the end of each article, along with your 
contact information.

<<I'm used to writing manuals and not articles, if there's a 
difference.>>

A very big difference. Articles are intended to inform and be 
read; manuals are intended to instruct and be used. If you 
want to get a visceral feeling for how this works, compare a 
typical software manual with a newsmagazine like Time or 
Newsweek: very different styles. You'll be trying to adopt 
something more like the newsmagazine style.


--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all those sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But I 
suspect 
that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence." George Miller, "The Magical Number Seven" (1956)