ShopWriting articles: Step by step
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| on Thursday 29 June 2006 by Classic-Space  in Articles |
Writing articles: Step by step
1. Find a subject.
To write an article, you should have an interesting subject. Is there something that you are good at, or that you feel many ask questions about? The subject can be practically anything, as long as it is relevant to Lego space.
2. Research the subject.
Do this before writing in order to get good references, see what has previously been published, know what you should focus on and so forth.
3. Create a disposition.
To get a good structure of your essay, this step is very important. Before you start writing the article, outline everything that you want in it in the order you want it, and make sure that it feels logical. The disposition of the greeble-article looked something like this:
Introduction
-What is greebling?
-Greebling for spacers
Greebling
-Where to greeble
--Break up boring areas
--Bottom of ships
--Smooth transitions
--Cockpits
....and so on.
4. Let the disposition become a first draft.
Now that you’ve got your essay researched and outlined, it’s time to start writing. Use your disposition to make sure everything gets to where it should be. If you find something that you want to add to your article, but hasn’t got a natural place in the outline – modify the disposition to make room for it. Remember that you don’t have to write the introduction first – it is often easier to write it last.
This is also the step where you make sure your article has a decent layout that helps reading it. That includes headlines, picture placement and so on.
A quick note on language: while you are free to write in whatever style you want, to get the most out of your article the chosen style should be appropriate for the document (conveys the meaning well, is coherent etc). Take a look at the published articles to get a feeling for how they are written.
5. Let others read it.
In order to get the most out of your article, let others read it and comment. Look at your essay as a MOC: in order to improve, criticism is essential. And as when building, others are better than you at spotting your mistakes. Spacewerks is, as always, an excellent place to get feedback.
6. Improve the article.
Take the comments to heart and improve your article as much as you can. Both language-, content- and layout wise. Use this guide as a recommendation for formatting. Create clear titles for new sections. Use bullets and bold text to highlight important points. Use block quotes and hyperlinks to call out references and further reading.
7. Do step 5-6 again.
You might have to create and distribute several drafts in order to get to the finish line.
8. Publish it.
To publish your article, go to the content manager and click on “submit content”. Choose your content type (article, most likely) and you should see this screen. Here’s how you fill in the form:
Heading: The heading should be short and descriptive. This article’s heading is “Writing articles”.
Subheading: The subheading can be a bit more elaborate, but should still be descriptive. This article’s subheading is “Step by step”.
Summary: A short and good summary of the document. This will show, together with other information on the document, on the content selection screen.
Text: Your finished article goes here. It uses the same codes for links, images and so forth as the rest of the forum, so it should be a simple copy and paste if you’ve published it in Spacewerks already.
This is what you need to do in order to get the article published, but feel free to tinker about with the additional boxes.
9. Wait for moderation, and revel in your article’s published glory.
In order to make sure that the content section has a certain quality, all of the entries are moderated. The moderators may deem it necessary to change the document in any way, but if that happen the author is naturally made aware of this.
After that process, you can comfortably sit back and know that you’ve done something good for the community. Congratulations!
If your editing process was not as perfect as Kyle demanded, and you really must change something after submission, you may contact Aaron Sneary with requests for edits. Edits to submitted articles are restricted to one request per article per year. (Updates to the Acronym FAQ are exempt).
1. Find a subject.
To write an article, you should have an interesting subject. Is there something that you are good at, or that you feel many ask questions about? The subject can be practically anything, as long as it is relevant to Lego space.
2. Research the subject.
Do this before writing in order to get good references, see what has previously been published, know what you should focus on and so forth.
3. Create a disposition.
To get a good structure of your essay, this step is very important. Before you start writing the article, outline everything that you want in it in the order you want it, and make sure that it feels logical. The disposition of the greeble-article looked something like this:
Introduction
-What is greebling?
-Greebling for spacers
Greebling
-Where to greeble
--Break up boring areas
--Bottom of ships
--Smooth transitions
--Cockpits
....and so on.
4. Let the disposition become a first draft.
Now that you’ve got your essay researched and outlined, it’s time to start writing. Use your disposition to make sure everything gets to where it should be. If you find something that you want to add to your article, but hasn’t got a natural place in the outline – modify the disposition to make room for it. Remember that you don’t have to write the introduction first – it is often easier to write it last.
This is also the step where you make sure your article has a decent layout that helps reading it. That includes headlines, picture placement and so on.
A quick note on language: while you are free to write in whatever style you want, to get the most out of your article the chosen style should be appropriate for the document (conveys the meaning well, is coherent etc). Take a look at the published articles to get a feeling for how they are written.
5. Let others read it.
In order to get the most out of your article, let others read it and comment. Look at your essay as a MOC: in order to improve, criticism is essential. And as when building, others are better than you at spotting your mistakes. Spacewerks is, as always, an excellent place to get feedback.
6. Improve the article.
Take the comments to heart and improve your article as much as you can. Both language-, content- and layout wise. Use this guide as a recommendation for formatting. Create clear titles for new sections. Use bullets and bold text to highlight important points. Use block quotes and hyperlinks to call out references and further reading.
7. Do step 5-6 again.
You might have to create and distribute several drafts in order to get to the finish line.
8. Publish it.
To publish your article, go to the content manager and click on “submit content”. Choose your content type (article, most likely) and you should see this screen. Here’s how you fill in the form:
Heading: The heading should be short and descriptive. This article’s heading is “Writing articles”.
Subheading: The subheading can be a bit more elaborate, but should still be descriptive. This article’s subheading is “Step by step”.
Summary: A short and good summary of the document. This will show, together with other information on the document, on the content selection screen.
Text: Your finished article goes here. It uses the same codes for links, images and so forth as the rest of the forum, so it should be a simple copy and paste if you’ve published it in Spacewerks already.
This is what you need to do in order to get the article published, but feel free to tinker about with the additional boxes.
9. Wait for moderation, and revel in your article’s published glory.
In order to make sure that the content section has a certain quality, all of the entries are moderated. The moderators may deem it necessary to change the document in any way, but if that happen the author is naturally made aware of this.
After that process, you can comfortably sit back and know that you’ve done something good for the community. Congratulations!
If your editing process was not as perfect as Kyle demanded, and you really must change something after submission, you may contact Aaron Sneary with requests for edits. Edits to submitted articles are restricted to one request per article per year. (Updates to the Acronym FAQ are exempt).
