How-to Write Articles for TecHow

If you are reading this post chances are that either you are a reader of TecHow or want to be a writer for TecHow. In both cases specially for the later one, we strongly recommend you to go through this entire article. This article will teach you everything that you need to know in order to submit articles to TecHow. Since TecHow is an How-To site for technology issues, we thought that it would be fair to structure these instructions in exactly the way we want the other articles to be. So this guide will not just teach you about How-to submit articles to TecHow, it also serves as a sample How-To article in its own right.

Having said all this, lets begin with the actual writing guidelines:

Step 1: Finding a Topic to Write

The first step in writing an article is to come with a topic on which to write. There would be two ways to go about it. One would be that you come up with article ideas of your own. These ideas should explain our readers about how-to perform a certain task using some application or technology.

The second option would be to follow our Google Reader shared feed. We follow dozens of blogs and share 2-3 dozen ideas on our shared feed. Each of these shared story could be transformed into an How-to article. You can browse through the shared feed each day and select the stories that you want to cover.

Do take a look at our shared feed to have a feel for the kind of topics on which we want you to write.

Step 2: Getting the Articles Assigned

Once you have selected the stories that you want to cover, you should select the link of those stories and submit them to TecHow’s yammer network. If you dont already know about Yammer, it is a group communication system similar to Twitter, but designed to be used for organizations like us. The links that we would post and discussions that we would do on Yammer will not be visible to people outside of our company.

Posting links to yammer is similar to posting links to Twitter, however you should follow the following tag conventions:

• #pitch: The pitch tag should be attached to all story links that you are submitting to yammer. This will enable the editor to quickly find out what stories have been pitched and by whom.
• #assigned: Once an editor see’s a story with a pitch tag, he will insert an assigned tag to it and will also write assigned in the comment. This will let you know that the story is now assigned to you and you can work on it.
• #pending: After you have written your story and have completed it in all aspects, you would insert the pending tag to the story that you pitched earlier. The pending tag will let the editor know that the story is finished and he should review it.
• #published: Once the editor has reviewed and published your story, he will assign the published tag to the story on yammer. This will let you know that your story has been published on the site.

Step 3: Writing the How-to Article

• Since you would already have a story from which you would formulate your article, you must ensure that nothing is ripped from that story and that every word you write is just that, your own word.
• Your write up must be structured into different sections and should take the reader and walk him/her through the various steps.  As an example, see how we have structured this article into various steps. There should also be an introductory paragraph in the beginning.
• The final write up must not have any grammatical mistakes.

Step 4: Working With Images

Step 5: Working With Tags and Categories

Step 6: Finishing it Up