This chapter covers
- Shifting from capturing what’s in your brain to communicating with your reader
- Catching your target readers’ interest and guiding them to the end
- Prioritizing optimizations that matter the most for technical audiences
- Helping your reader better understand what you’re trying to communicate
At this point, you’re past the hard part: the creation. Most people breathe a sigh of relief, maybe use a grammar checker to resolve egregious errors, and call it done. But you’re currently reading a book on writing blog posts, so you’re clearly not most people.
This chapter outlines ways to make your blog post more compelling, whether you have just 5 minutes or more than 5 hours to spend whipping it into shape. We tried to capture the essence of the internal monologue that comes naturally after writing and reviewing a healthy amount of engineering blog posts and other forms of technical writing.
Ultimately, it all comes down to taking the brain dump you created in the previous chapter and making it seem custom crafted for your target reader. You want to present your reader with something that fills in any knowledge gaps between what the two of you know, satisfies their curiosity, and makes it simple (hopefully even enjoyable) for them to grasp what they were hoping to learn when they clicked your article.