General Format of Writing a Technical Article for a Blog

A Guide on How to Write and Publish a Technical Article in 10 Simple Steps

Joy of Technical Writing — unsplash photo

After proper planning, researching and jotting down key ideas, the final step is to write and publish your article. Whatever platform you choose to share you article, following systematic format is very important if you want your readers to adequately digest your content and you achieve best result.

A typical technical article is between 1,000 to 3,000 words. It addresses a specific issues. Any reader who goes through your article will be able to gain certain insights, acquire news skills, learn new knowledge, attain certain clarification etc. You want to write a technical article for your blog or magazine and you need a straight forward format on how to start, this article is for you.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Outline

1. Preliminary

2. Content

i. The Header Section

ii. Introduction Section

iii. Table of Contents Section

iv. Prerequisite Section

v. Content and Activity Section

vi. Result Section

vii. Conclusion Section

viii. Question and Answer Section

ix. Resources Section

3. Conclusion

4. References

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

1. Preliminary

Ensure your draft checks the following:

• ✅ firstly, your draft satisfies all editorial guidelines and conditions
• ✅ secondly, your draft is origin and where appropriate, you have given appropriate references to all the sources you have used.
• ✅ more to that, your draft free of ethnic, gender, racial, religious, and national biases.
• ✅ most importantly, your draft clear state the rationale, relevance, significance of the subject matter.
• ✅ worth emphasizing, your draft demonstrate the benefits the reader will derive
• ✅ In addition, your draft defines all the abbreviations you have used
• ✅ Lastly, you use only simple and relevant analogies and metaphors

2. The Content

In the following paragraphs, you start writing out your article.

i. The Header

Your article structurally is made of the 3 sections. The header, the body and the footer.The body starts from the Introduction to the Conclusion. The footer is reserved for References. The header carries the title, subtitle, and a banner picture. The first line of your article is title and and followed by subtitle if applicable. The title should be about 80 characters, catchy. Get a relevant picture with the appropriate dimension.

ii. Introduction

This is the fist paragraph of your article. take your reader’s mind to the background that clearly highlight the purpose, motivation, and goal of the article. Equally important, you state your scope of work.

iii. Article Outline

The outline or table of content should properly itemize the headings. For an online article, you should create an internal hyperlink with the various sections of the article for ease of navigation.

iv. Prerequisite

Here, you should list the requirements your readers need to effectively consume the content. State previous experience, software, system configuration.

v. Content

This section is for the content proper. It should be broken down into steps or series of tasks the reader should carry out. Itemize the steps so that you can easily refer to them later on. The Steps should flow naturally, each task proceeding from a previous task and leading consequently to the next.

Here it is important to highlight individual difference in style, preference, system, taking environmental variables / conditions into account. Demonstrate code samples, operations, output, accompanied with screenshots.

Alternative operations should be mentioned. Clearly state most probable What-ifs scenarios and common pitfalls (readers would thank you for it).

vi. Final Result

Here comes the Crème de la crème! The ultimate goal of the project. It should fulfill the goal you set initially. It should satisfy the learning outcome of the project. This is the deployment stage. All test should be satisfied.

vii. Conclusion

Recap on the introduction and summarize the work done so far. High light the result. make recommendations for further reading and research.

viii. Question and Answers

Pose simple question readers should take home. Alternatively, you could provide answers too. Encourage readers to ask questions and state challenges in the comment sections. Do not take this emphasis for granted. Readers feedback may be very instrumental to refining not just the content but also improving your skill as a technical writer.

ix. Resources

Provide link to the code base repository in github.com or bitbucket.com. The repository should create branches for each step of the project. The master branch should be the completed project.

Specify the links of other useful or related article to your readers. Finally, encourage the to share.

3. Conclusion

This is a general format of writing a technical article for a blogs and online magazines. It guides a developer on how to write and publish a blog-post in 10 simple steps.

4. Reference

A link to a markdown template will be added here

Thanks for reading!