I wrote this for a reply to another topic on a different forum, but it seems applicable here, so I'll just paste it in, if you don't mind. Some of my writing advice:
Audience
Understanding your audience is important to writing, just as it is to user interface design. You should know what lengths of writing work well for the attention span of your audience and you should vary your lengths from time to time. It's also vital to speak the same language. I'm not just talking about a spoken or written language like English or French; there are also cultural and sub-cultural contexts and euphemisms to which you need to pay attention. This will affect what content you produce and also how you present it. For instance, if your intended audience is pro-Linux, writing about Windows frequently isn't going to gain you a very large readership unless you are somehow also able to relate it to Linux.
Writing on the web is different than writing a book because the Internet and books are vastly different mediums. There are many different types of readers and you need to be able to provide something for all of them. Some readers will skim articles and others will read every word. You need to cater to both of them. Here's how:
- Provide headers and section breaks for skimmers.
- Vary your paragraph lengths. The variety breaks monotony and you definitely don't want monotony. Visual breaks also will not tire readers as easily.
- Use summary and conclusion paragraphs and sentences throughout your writing, but only when you aren't being redundant.
- Lists and bullet points help a lot. Pictures do too.
Simplicity
Reduce complexity. Write as simply as you can. I've seen the quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery many times while reading software articles, but it definitely applies to writing as well: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” It's far better to enable your readers to understand your writing than to awe them with pseudo-intellectual jargon.
So how can you write simply?
- Reduce concepts and ideas into understandable and smaller pieces.
- Anticipate questions and answer them in advance.
- Minimize the number of clauses that you use. Run-on sentences should be reworked into smaller sentences. As a general rule, unless you have a comma-separated list, you should look at a rewrite if you have more than two or three commas or semi-colons in your sentence.
- Don't assume a reader's level of knowledge. Build your writing from the ground up so that you can be sure that you and your reader are speaking the same language. This doesn't mean that you can't write about advanced or very technical subjects, but it helps if you can at least provide a link for beginners to get up to speed.
Style
Style is what separates the technically competent writers from the writers whom everyone enjoys reading. In fact, compelling style can cover over a lot of writing faults. People like humor, personality, controversy, etc. Weave a story into your writing, make it real and applicable to your audience in some way, tell jokes (if you're good at that sort of thing), make a controversial claim; there are many different methods you can use to incorporate your own personality or even a manufactured persona into your writing. This is called your narrative voice.
There are also a few technical aspects that can affect style. Using active voice is usually a good choice over using passive voice. An example of a passive sentence could be, "Mary was driven to the hospital by John." There is nothing wrong with the sentence grammatically, but it isn't very interesting. Consider the same sentence written in an active voice: "John drove Mary to the hospital." It's much more immediate and interesting and there's actually a bit of tension.
Here's the difference between active and passive sentences:
- Passive - The subject is the recipient of the verb
- Active - The subject is the actor or doer of the verb
Word choice is another technical component of style. Again, you'll want to choose words that are appropriate to your audience's culture and education. When you've finished writing something, reread what you've written, look for repeated words, and replace them with similar words where possible.
