Post WikiHow Project

 

The struggles and hiccups of creating a guide on how to do something using wikihow as the website to publish the guide came from way more than just editing the coding for the article. Simply writing the steps was harder than expected. To write a thorough step by step guide on how to cook something took a couple of tries. Avoiding some key mistakes are more difficult than expected on the first day of the project. Using "you" or "I" is more natural than one thinks. When writing a guide, it’s only natural to want to write it as if it was explained one on one with the reader. Sadly, fixing this mistake can take a few attempts and ultimately for this project this mistake took until the final version to get fixed. It’s unbelievable how easy it is to overlook this, and even when writing objectively for other things, writing a guide can land right in the “and now you… so you can… when you are” sentences.

Another thing to note about this project was the photos. Now everyone knows to take more than one photo when they are doing something like this. In a cooking guide, retaking photos could mean rebuying expensive ingredients or taking an entire afternoon redoing everything. However, there is more to it than just this. Occasionally when taking photos, things can slip the mind and photos can end up looking very different from each other. Different angles, different lighting, possibly even different people in the photos could interfere with the “story” being told. Keeping everything along the same lines and looking similar will let the reader follow along easily and not have to wonder why the person cooking the food randomly changed or something as simple as why is the stove two different stoves in two photos. Tiny things can distract, and the best thing in a guide is to make everything follow the same logic. Using similar angles for photos and using the same equipment in all photos will make more sense and let the reader focus on the guide itself and not wondering what they are looking at.

In addition, when writing a guide for wikihow, the author might want to create a super in-depth guide on how to do something. Explaining every single detail and getting paragraphs of information in every single step along the way. It may seem smart to provide as much information as possible, but nobody wants to read all of that. A good wikihow guide on how to do something is short, to the point, but doesn’t skip anything at all. This is by far one of the most challenging things for new writers. To be able to coherently describe in detail how to do something and yet somehow manage to do this without overstepping themselves and writing a novel description on something as simple as turning on the stove. Managing the word count can help, but to truly keep things brief the author just needs to reread and cut away any repetition and unnecessary sentences. Write as much as possible for a guide, but before ever even considering hitting the publish button, cut away as much as possible. Highschool, college, pretty much any American education has drilled into its students that they need to hit a word count and fluff everything up until that number is met. When it comes to writing a guide for someone to follow, this is thrown out the window.

Finally, writing a wikihow guide on how to do something can truly help one’s ability to explain something to someone. It may not be written as if it was one on one between two people face to face, but learning how to keep things short yet explanatory can help so many people teach other things in the future. Even if the topic of the wikihow in question is about how to cook Italian crepes, just learning the skills on how to make a how to guide could help that person explain something quick and to the point in real life.