写作方法2014training.kalzumeus.com编辑精选
让你的文字为你更卖力地工作
Making Your Writing Work Harder For You
导读
这篇讨论如何让写作在职业和产品业务中发挥更大作用，而不是把文章随手堆成按时间倒序的博客。它值得写作者读，因为文中和评论都强调：少而精地打磨作品、明确希望读者采取的行动，并处理好日期与发布格式带来的语境问题。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
不要默认采用博客的流水账格式：与其持续写500到1000字、主题零散的文章，不如集中打磨三篇高质量作品。
- 02
发布作品时补上入门指南、清晰视觉标识和明确行动请求，让内容真正为职业或产品目标服务。
- 03
给文章标注日期，让读者能判断写作时的语境和假设，避免因缺少时间信息降低信任。
- 04
避免让文章看起来像随手草稿或讨论邀请；通过命名、包装和定位，让读者知道这是你认真打磨后的定论。
HN 评论精选
写博客有价值，但应少而精、认真包装并明确行动请求，而不是套用松散的博客格式。
这部分是在回应 Thomas 和我最近和一些网友的讨论：写作或博客在职业发展中有什么价值。他的观点是“要有博客，但别把它叫博客”。我认为这可以推广到产品业务中比博客更大的范围。现在人们一般叫“内容营销”，但我讨厌这个词——如果有人有更好的说法，请建议。顺便说，如果你是个普通极客，想知道“写技术主题会不会对职业有帮助”，答案是“绝对会”。你可以用博客软件，但采用博客格式——500到1000字、按时间倒序展示、主题彼此不连贯——大概对你没好处。相反，你可以把目标定为写三篇，并把它们打磨到镜面般光亮。我常说的相关建议是：如果你发布开源项目并期望从中得到什么，不要只把它丢到 GitHub。多花点时间把它包装成一个站点，配上入门指南、区别于“GitHub 渲染 Readme 文件”的视觉标识，并请求感兴趣的人采取你希望他们采取的行动。
patio11查看英文原文
This was partly in response to a conversation Thomas and I have been having lately with some people from the Internets, about the value of blogging in one's professional capacity. His take was "Have a blog, but don't call it a blog." I thought that was generalizable to a larger segment of the operations of product businesses than just blogging. They're generally called "content marketing" these days but I hate that word -- if someone has a better one, please suggest it. By the way, if you're a regular-ol'-geek and wondering "I wonder if writing about technical topics could help me career-wise", the answer is "Absolutely yes." You can use blogging software but it probably isn't your benefit to adopt the blogging format of 500 ~ 1,000 word articles displayed in reverse chronological order about disconnected topics. Instead, you could make it a goal to write three pieces and polish them to a mirror shine. (Related advice that I find myself saying frequently: If you publish OSS and expect to get anything via doing so, don't just drop the OSS on github. Spend the extra bit of time packing it into a site with a getting-started guide, a visual identity distinct from "Github rendering a Readme file", and the request that interested people $TAKE_THE_ACTION_YOU_WANT_THEM_TO_TAKE.
日期是读者判断语境和内容是否过时的重要信息，不标日期会降低信任。
我不喜欢读到没有日期的文章，因为那样我无法判断作者是在什么语境或视角下写的。比如“移动市场在增长”这个断言，是在2008年iPhone之前还是之后？即使我们努力写常青内容，也有很多被视为理所当然的假设；有时这些假设过一阵会被推翻。遇到没有日期的文章、随笔、博客时，我通常会更不信任，并试着找有日期的同类信息。只有经过时间你才知道自己的写作是否常青。我会读2002年的东西并发现它仍然相关，但我们需要每年自己判断它是否仍相关；不标时间戳就剥夺了我们这样判断的机会。
iamwil查看英文原文
I dislike coming upon writing where there's no date. Because then I can't judge for myself from what context or perspective the author wrote something. (Is the assertion that mobile market is growing in the context of pre 2008 iPhone, or after?) There's many assumptions we take for granted, even when we try to write evergreen. And sometimes those assumptions turn out to be overturned after a while. When I happen upon articles, essays, blog posts, etc without a date, I usually trust it much less, and try to find similar information with a date. The only way you'll know if your writing is evergreen, is over the course of time. I'll read stuff from 2002, and find it's still relevant, but we need to judge whether it is for ourselves every year. And not timestamping it robs us of that.
任何作品都有时间语境，隐藏日期即使能骗流量也是对读者不负责。
每部作品都有时间语境。即使要过100年才变得无关，让人们能查到它写于何时仍然有用。书需要年份，科学论文的PDF需要发表日期。不显示日期也许有一些浅薄的流量优势，但这是在损害读者，仍然是不厚道的行为。
marijn查看英文原文
Every work has a time context. Even if it takes 100 years for it to become irrelevant, it is still useful for people to be able to find out when it was written. Books need a year, pdfs of scientific articles need a publication date. Doing your audience a disservice by not showing a date may have some shallow traffic driving advantages, but is still a dick move.
博客格式会让读者把认真作品误当随手草稿或讨论帖，改变命名和呈现方式能保护作品价值。
网上的人会为这件事很生气：“当然该给文章标日期！”“读者足够聪明，能理解有些东西有长期价值！”别听他们的。读者当然聪明到能看出博客文章的长期价值，但他们不会，因为要体会到这种价值，他们得耗费脑力去对抗博客格式。相反，他们看到一篇博客文章会：假设因为它在博客上，所以是单次草稿写成的；假设它是众多博主更大对话的一部分；假设它是在邀请读者讨论，而不是你对某个问题的最终看法；假设它最终会和其他博客文章一起被聚合到“Planet People Like You”之类的博客聚合器上；假设它会在未来某篇帖子中被跟进。总的来说，读者并没有错，这些信念不断被大多数博客验证。所以我想知道，为什么有人会花几天或几周写一篇东西，却故意把它和每一篇匆匆写就的博客文章放在一起。我认为只做 Patrick 说的那件事——写博客，但别叫它博客——就能立刻获得价值。但你也可以做更有创意的事。我们的 crypto challenges 最初只是一个文本文件……
tptacek查看英文原文
People on the Internet get really angry about this. "Of course you should have a dateline on your posts!" "Readers are smart enough to understand when something has long-term value!" Don't listen to them. Of course readers are smart enough to perceive long-term value in a blog post. But they don't, because appreciating that value requires them to expend mental energy to fight against the blog format. Instead, they see a blog post and: * Assume that because it's on the blog it was written in a single draft. * Assume that it's part of some larger conversation amongst lots of bloggers. * Assume it's an invitation to a discussion among readers rather than your definitive take on an issue. (For extra fun: add a series of complaints about not having "comments" enabled on whatever you wrote.) * Assume that it'll end up syndicated along with the rest of your blog posts on "Planet People Like You" or whatever blog aggregator you end up on. * Assume that it'll be followed up on in some future post. In general, the reader isn't wrong about this! Those beliefs are continuously validated by the majority of blogs. Which makes me wonder why anyone would sink days or weeks of effort into a piece only to deliberately position it alongside every other dashed-off blog post. I think you can get immediate value just by doing what Patrick said: write a blog, but don't call it that. But you can do things that are much more creative, too. Our crypto challenges started out as a text file of 40 3-paragraph challenges. We thought about putting it up on the website, but we worried that we'd end up getting skimmed by people on (not to put too fine a point on it) HN who wouldn't really understand them, and end up "debating our own posts" with those people. So instead of publishing them, we accepted email addresses for people who wanted them, and doled them out 8 challenges at a time. More than 12,000 people signed up; we're finally releasing them in their entirety, along with solutions in every single mainstream language and a bunch of weird ones, in a Black Hat talk this year. It became one of our most profitable recruiting vehicles. It was originally a blog post. Man, that would have sucked, if we stuck a date and a title on it and hit "publish".
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