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13 simple writing tips

I love reading, I love books, and my friends say I have an overactive imagination. So it may not be terribly surprising that back in my teens one of my dreams was to one day become an author. A world famous author of course. Writing good old fashioned books. Which would be published with my name on them and which people would line up in book stores to buy. New books with that new book smell. I'd sign them and impress the ladies with my wit and prose.

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Trouble writing? You probably aren't scaffolding enough

Having trouble writing? It may be just that you are having trouble doing two things at the same time:

  1. decide what the prose should say (substance)
  2. write the prose (form)

They are intimately interconnected. If you don't REALLY know what you want to say, you are going to have a hell of a time saying it. And then instead of actually writing sentences, you play with grammer and use alot of syntatic sugar until your sentence seems to have filled a respectable space (form over substance) and you can move on to the next one.

How to write a good changelog

In a nutshell, think of your users.

They read top to bottom. They have a very limited attention span. Even if they read all the way through, they're probably going to pay more attention to things that come early. Before patience runs thin.

So your goal is not only to describe changes but to figure out now to communicate as much value to users before they lose interest. If you do a really good job, you might actually prevent them from losing interest and they'll read all the way through. Don't bet on it though...