This article will try to give you some guidelines on writing articles. It is not meant to set down laws about how you must write; they are just recommendations. This article might be particularly useful for people who are new to writing for a magazine.

It is good to keep in mind the criteria that the editors follow when revising your article. Firstly, the article must be clear, well structured, and easy to read; it must be accurate; it must be at the right level for the target reader and it must use correct and appropriate English.

I will now look, one by one, at the basic steps in writing a good article.

Preparing an outline

The first stage is the preparation of the outline. You will need to have your outline approved before you start writing the actual article, and you may need to spend some time getting it right. The outline is the skeleton of the article, if it is poorly designed, then the article will be more difficult to read.

Each point must clearly show what it is describing or explaining, and why

It should be possible to have a clear idea of what the article is about through the outline, and it has to make sense to the person reading it!

Each point must clearly show what it is describing or explaining, and why.

There are several “models” of outlines that you can use. Here are a few:

Model 1

• Introduction to the problem
• Explanation of the basic concepts
• Application of these concepts
• Possible complications
• Explanation of possible complications

• Conclusion

  Model 2

• Introduction to the problem

• Main points of the problem
• Explanation point 1
• Explanation point 2
• Explanation point 3
• … more points here …
• Summary/other

• Conclusion

  Model 3

• Introduction

• How it works - in general
• A closer look
• Another closer look
• Behind the scenes
• Summary/other
• Conclusion

Choose the model that you think is most appropriate, or make up your own as long as it makes sense.

Sections and headings

The outline for your article should show clearly defined “sections”. Each section should have a meaningful heading. While you are writing the article keep the outline visible, and make sure that each section you write fulfils the purpose that it is given in the outline.

If you are explaining something technical, try to give straight forward examples or exercises that the reader can do while reading the article in front of his or her computer. For example, if you are writing about shell basics, and about simple ways of viewing the file system, give an appropriately simple exercise:

To see the list of files in the current directory, type ls -l

It sounds obvious, but often writers forget to do this.