Writing good articles that have much better chance to be seen by others

People may not realize that majority of article reads
come from search engines and not directly reading the
Usenet.

First of all, to find some information for some specific
issue you may be dealing with is pretty much a hopeless
excersize if you just read Usenet or some disorganized
archive.

It may take you days or even months to step though all sorts
of threads reading it all sequentially, without any kind
of filtering offered by search engines.

When people need to resolve some issue, the first thing
they do is to perform a search engine search on the buzzwords
they think are significant.

So, when they click on some link in the SERPS, they only see
one article. They can not even follow your thread unless they
are willing to spend minutes of their time, the chances of
which are slim as it gets.

So, from this standpoint, try to keep the context of the article
intact. No not delete some section of the article you are following
upon because you think it is "insignificant" in YOUR opinion.

Because it may turn out to be significant in readers opinion.

Note on writing style:

Many people do not realize their articles become available
worldwide on many different sites, servers, search engines
and libraries and will stay there forever.

When they write something, they may not even consider
that it is better to take your time and describe some
topic completely so it becomes a reference material
to be used for generations to come.

Instead, they write cryptic articles that, when viewed
by themselves, may not even make much sense to someone,
who is not reading it on Usenet by following a thread
or as competent as the writer is.

Some people strip most of the article they followup on,
and it becomes virtually impossible to understand what
they are talking about. Because this article may just
appear somewhere by itself, without the preceeding
articles in a thread.

Keep it in mind.

Again, it is better to write a thorough and detailed
article to put the issue to rest once and for all,
instead of saying the same thing again and again.

You can simply refer people to that original article
instead of doing it from top again, wasting your own
time and energy and producing very lil additional
information with net effect of close to 0.

Most, if not all the articles on this group, or any other,
are available via all sorts of sources on the web, and web
is how it is all read when you really need some answer.

Unfortunately, some people write pretty sloppy articles
with huge blobs of text, without line breaks between
their followup and the original article, long line lengths,
and generally careless style. The result: their articles
are not a great pleasure to read or understand.

Generally, the paragraph size should be limited to separate
different concepts into clearly defined blocks. That makes
it much easier to digest. In today's hectic world, people
are very impatient and will push the next button as soon
as they see the first ugly blob of text.

General suggestions on writing on Usenet:

1. NEVER, under ANY circumstances use lines that are longer
than 70 characters. This is NNTP standard limitations.
All the lines longer than 79 characters will be wrapped
around in in quite an ugly way.

So, considering there may be followups to your article,
and somtimes MANY followups, remember this: each followup
adds at least one character to the line length.

2. NEVER, under any circumstances "top post", meaning
writing your entire response BEFORE the article you are
following up.

Fist of all, it is simply insultive. You couldn't be bothered.
Secondly, it is simply sloppy.
Thirdly, is makes it hard for a reader to put YOUR comments
in the proper context and takes things out of context.

3. Watch the white space around your comments and the
original article. It is best to have at least one blank
line before your follow up and one blank line after.

Extra blank lines do not help anything.
No blank lines makes it all dense and hard to read
as things run into each other.

4. NEVER use tab characters. They are not going to be properly
expanded. Even if you post some code that uses tabs in your
IDE, replace them with spaces.

5. Try to provide a sufficient description and rationale
for things you are saying. Simply making some statement
without reasoning why do you think it is valid is just a
waste.

Readers are not necessarily mind readers. They may not be
on your level of competence or may not know some issues
as good as you. So, if you do not explain why are you saying
this or that, your article will be useless to them.

6. Do not worry about "on-topic" issues for some thread.
Again. Most of the page reads will be done via search
engine and in the web format and not from a news reader.

It does not matter to search engine what is your subject
line more or less. It will still be able to find your
article by looking at its body.

Sure, having the same keywords in subject header and body
will increase the chances your article will come up in
higher postition in the SERPS. But no need to be paraniod
about it and to keep splitting the discussion into new
and new threads unnecessarily. It is better to see how
some subject evoloves.

7. Do not waste your time on personal attacks, humiliation
and insults. That does not buy you anything. It just gets
the discussion deluted with unpleasant things.

If you think YOUR ego is the most important thing in the
world, think again. Because it is about the last thing
the readers would care for. They need answers to THEIR
"problems" and not your "holier than thoug" image.
They could care less.

Summary:

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