How to write a good tutorial
Lots of people write how to’s and tutorials, but I’m not so sure most of their readers understand the things they are trying to explain there. Why? Because most of these tutorials lack a couple of common sense basic rules that every tutorial writer should know.
If you were to synthesize those rules in a short list, it would look somehow like this:
- make your tutorials specific and detailed
- write in steps
- use short sentences and repetition to reinforce the main ideas
- use text formatting options (Strong, Italic, etc) to emphasize the main parts in your tutorials
- use as many visual aids as possible
- the readers of your tutorial are complete newbies, so don’t assume they know things from their previous experience, things you could skip in your tutorial. No! Make sure you don’t skip ANY step and make your tutorial as explicit as possible
- make sure your tutorial is readable and understandable by your targeted traffic. Thus, don’t use terms and abbreviations your readers might not know without explaining them
- link to other articles treating the same subject
- try to offer some concrete examples and explain how you solved them
- leave room for
interpretationcomments and feedback
The first tutorial on how to write one ?
I don’t really get what you mean
Great tips for creating a helpful tutorial.
Leave room for interpretation – that’s a stupid piece of advice.
You must be specific and very clear!
Hmmm, perhaps room for interpretation is not the best way to say it. I meant room for discussions, comments. Like this form where people can say what they liked or not about this little post
If you write tutorial and want to spread the word, then you should use tutorial submission sites . There are plenty of good sites that are happy to receive your tutorial, and link back to your site. Have a look at it 42 Sites Where To Submit Your Tutorials
The trickiest kinds of tutorials to write are programming tutorials; those can be extremely tricky because there’s a higher chance the reader won’t understand what you’re saying.