[DoEE] Technical writing guide

Day 2,730, 02:40 • Published in Australia Australia • by Aus Ministry of Finance



Today, we present a technical writing guide. No, not how to write an engineer’s report or anything along those lines. How to use the various commands and functions in your newspaper to produce a visually appealing outcome. The subjective stuff, like what to actually say, that’s all on you…



It will be best if you play along while you’re reading. So, open a new tab, go into your newspaper homepage and click on “Write Article”. Don’t stress, you’re not publishing anything yet!


You’ll see a big text box with some buttons at the top. The big box is where you write the content of your article. We’ll get to that later. First though, the buttons. They look like this:



The first three on the left are exactly what you’d expect if you were in Word. That is, bold, italics and underline. They can be combined (like almost every piece of BB code), but be careful because they don’t all look good on-screen. For an example:


This text is in bold. It is good for headings and calling attention to specific parts of a paragraph.


This text is in italics. It is hard to read in a big block and you will need to use small paragraphs. In other words, use it sparingly. You will definitely annoy people if you go on. And on. And on, in this style.


This text is in underline. It looks ugly and serves little purpose. Worse, it looks like a hyperlink sometimes.


This text is in bold and underline. Use it if you’re angry, but it looks even uglier than regular underline. ESPECIALLY IF YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS!!!1


This text is in italics and underline. Good luck getting your point across, because most people mentally sigh when they see it! And then they stop reading...


We could go on, but you probably get the point now.


The next button (the fourth from the left) is a shortcut to inserting an image. You will need an internet hosted image. The URL should start with http:// and end with .jpg, .png or any of the other image formats. Movies (.gif) also work if they are online. You cannot pull images from your computer hard drive. If you want to upload from your hard drive, tiny pic offers a free upload service. The ads and anti-spam suck, but it is still “free” to use.


If you don’t want to use the image shortcut (maybe you write on Google Docs first, like we do), put [.img] Your Pic Here[./img] in. Without the dots between the square brackets (they are there to stop the commands working, so you can see them...).


Next, links. Click the link and a window pops up. Past your desired link into the box. The game will then highlight some text “Your Link Here”. Fill in what you want the link to say. It is the difference between:


This is my profile: http://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/8649803

And this is my profile


In terms of BB code, use the following without the dots:

[.url=http://blah.blah.com]Text for display[./url]


Moving along… Strikethrough. The S with a horizontal bar through it. Used for humourous purposes mostly, to say something you don’t really want to say. People subconsciously skip that part. Cool, huh?

Neeext! Line breaks. Very important visual break. They look like this.



Or you can use six dashes (-) in a row. Notice how the text is broken up into digestible blocks now?


Nearly done on basic functions guys, hang in there. The speech bubble? For emails inside text. Not very useful, can’t say I’d be comfortable publishing my email frankly. If you want to use it, it looks like this:

Y'all can email me at: IEatSpam@gmail.com


Or, My fake email addy for spammers and stalkers from ERepublik. See how you can combine different features, nesting BB codes within each other?


Second to last now. The opposing arrows. My tooltip says it is “clean” but the button never does anything for me. Presumably it erases all the existing text in the article content box.


On the right hand side, a green tick. By far the most useful button, this is the preview button. Press it when you’ve put your first draft in and a preview window will appear above the article content box. Use it to check that images are displaying, links appear correctly and the formatting is showing up how it is supposed to. Invariably, something gets missed (trust me!). If you make any changes you'll have to press it again to update the preview.



If you’re still reading, that’s good. Go and practice with the basic commands first. These next commands are not accessible with buttons. You will need to use BB Code to enter them. That means typing commands within the square brackets. In all cases, remove the “.” from inside the brackets below if you are going to use them.


FIrstly, the comparatively useless superscript. You would use it for exponents in mathematical formulae. I can’t think of many other uses. The command is [.sup] [./sup]


Superscript has a converse. Subscript. Handy for chemical formulae, like this. H2O : Water. Of no general value, like superscript. The command is [.sub] [./sub]


Text formatting uses a few other commands. They are all commonsense. You get the same options as MS Word, basically.


[.center] [./center] gives you:

Text centered on the page. It is annoying to read.
Because your eye can’t go back to a consistent
starting point every new line.


Despite the irritation, the centre command is very useful for putting images in the middle of the screen.


As you would expect, [.right] [/.right] gives you:

Right justified text.
This is awful for English and is very hard to read. Languages that read right to left, like Arabic, find it far more useful.
If you use this in an article I will haunt you forever…


Without any commands, left justification (normal text like this) is the default.


You can also indent your text using [.indent][./indent].
It is very useful for making lists

Of things to do.

Obviously it doesn’t work if you center the text.


And finally, the hardest command to use.

It looks very sexy
if you pull it off! 		But getting things looking right.
Is quite hard and takes a long time. 		Be careful with whites space!! (that's the separation between words and lines).


The commands are [.columns] first column text [.nextcol] second column text [./columns].


You can extend it to a third or fourth column, or even more (just drop an extra [.nextcol] in). But two is enough (I was using three in the example above), otherwise you won’t fit all a whole word into each column.



I’m sure there are even more commands than we know about and have written here. The article is already too long though! If you know any more controls, please share them in the comments section.



Brought to you by your friendly DoE team, Ilene Dover and Gueneo.


Our doors are always open for advice and feedback. Especially about articles!