Hey again, Sloan here! š¦„
Weāre sharing some tips for success when it comes to writing on DEV. If youāve been looking to improve your technical writing skills, make the most of DEV as a blogging platform, and take your content to the next level ā this series is for you!
The first two posts in the series were about creating a series and formatting. This one is about tone of voice, and the next one is about topics. Let's get started!
Tone of Voice
When it comes to writing, your tone of voice is the manner in which youāre speaking to the audience. In order to succeed on DEV, we recommend writing with a tone of voice that is friendly, inclusive, and non-condescending.
To learn more about how to utilize tone of voice in content writing, check out this awesome resource from the Nielsen Norman Group!
Title
Your postās title is your first chance to make a good impression! A lot of factors come into play when deciding on the perfect post title.
If you are interested in optimizing your content for search engines, you might have learned how to stuff your title with keywords. The truth is, while these things might make your content more likely to be visible to search enginesā¦they sometimes make them less appealing for your human readers.
If youāre trying to catch usersā attention, you might lead with a big claim to bait your readers to click (you knowā¦clickbait). While this seems like a good idea, and sometimes works to get those initial clicks, readers will be disappointed when they get to your article and realize that there actually isnāt āOne Amazing JavaScript Trick That Will Blow Your Mind, Change Your Life, and Automate Your Laundry!ā
We recommend using a title that sparks curiosity, but is true to the content. We also recommend limiting use of emoji in your title for accessibility reasons ā you can learn more about that from this article from Accessible Social.
Be yourself
The best way to add some personality to your content is to let your own personality shine through and speak from your own experience. Itās much more engaging to read a story about how you created your first Ruby gem than a generic explainer on creating a gem thatās copy and pasted from the docs.
Being yourself also means not being a robot in the literal sense. Here at DEV, weāre just as excited (and a little scared š ) about ChatGPT as you are! Thatās why we wrote a set of guidelines for AI-assisted content on DEV. Check them out at the link below:
Be inclusive
In order to make DEV a safe, fun, and helpful place for all developers, we take inclusivity very seriously. In short, we ask that you abide by our Code of Conduct, use inclusive language, and not make assumptions about community membersā gender identities or pronouns.
If youāre interested in fostering inclusivity on the web, we recommend checking out the Self-Defined dictionary.
Is it kind, necessary, and true?
I like to use this three-prong test to decide whether or not to share a particular communication:
- Is it kind? In other words, is it stated in a way thatās friendly, inclusive, and assumes good intentions?
- Is it necessary? In other words, does it need to be said for the reader to understand my point?
- Is it true? In other words, am I conveying information that I know to be true without misleading the reader?
With these tips in mind, you canāt go wrong when it comes to tone of voice in your writing on DEV. Happy writing! The next installment of this series will be about topics.
Top comments (7)
Keyword stuffing in specific parts of the page (title, headings, etc) is becoming less and less relevant these days. Modern search engines take into consideration so many factors of a websites content, including links into it (the weighting of which depends on the overall score of those respective sites, so tons of spam links to content no longer works), content freshness, and frequency of content updates on the site hosting the content.
Inclusive writing is one area that can be incredibly difficult to perfect. One approach I've taken when writing about web accessibility is to avoid labels that are generally avoided by a given community, and to remember that it is people who are sometimes the subject of some of my writing. So, for example, instead of referring to a group of people as "blind users", I might re-phrase that to something like "screen reader users", or "people with sight problems". This can help me be more specific to the people I am talking about, and is more encompassing of the range that a given disability might have: a person with sight problems isn't necessarily blind, and assumptions can actually lead to the wrong message being conveyed.
Awesome article and very good point about the tone and clickbaity titles. I'm hoping the clickbait stuff gets squashed more frequently.
This is perfect!! This adds-on to the other two! and I am gonna keep all this in my mind while writing my articles.
Ok, but then explain to me why the most condescending articles are always at the top of the listings for weeks? I'm getting very mixed signals here...
I think in general the whole tech industry suffers from this a little. Many tech spaces I've frequented over the years have had this, from mailing lists to things like StackOverflow. I think the competition aspect plays a part: people want to be seen as experts, and for some people, punching down is a way to achieve this.
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