Advice Writing Suggestions

Some suggestions on writing advice (derived from a post by a member at Minti):  

EXPAND ON THE INITIAL IDEA: We all have a lot of knowledge and experience to share each other but before rushing to click on "write advice", I suggest expanding your thoughts first. If you have a short advice, it may appear that you are just writing random thoughts, or that you are just simply voicing your opinion on a subject. If you just want your “opinions” known, it may be better if you write them on your blog. Readers can all still view them!  

DO A LITTLE RESEARCH: Some topics are not research-able, which is just fine. But most can be. A little internet research to back-up what you want to share, or just simply to offer other sites that point us to the same message so as to drive your point deeper.  

SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE: I am sure that you are sharing an advice because you have experience on the subject. Sharing one or two relevant experiences will personalize your story and make it easier for others to relate to you.  

RELATED ADVICE: As more and more advice is written, it is a great idea to check out other articles that have already been written on similar subjects. If you agree with most of the existing published advice and you just simply want to add a few things, consider writing a comment under the most relevant advice. If you are not satisfied with the existing advice, by all means share your wisdom, but remember to add other relevant advice links to other Refurber member’s articles. There is a spot on the bottom of your advice where you can add links to other great advice.  

FORMAT: If you only wish to write a one paragraph piece of advice that is fine.  However, if your advice is long and still only contains one or two paragraphs, it can be difficult to read through. For readers it can be hard to get the message when the article looks like it rambles on and on without nice formatting so consider some paragraph breaks, gaps or bold headings to improve the look and feel of your advice  

PROOF READ: It is a good idea to do some proof reading before you publish your article. We all understand that some typos happen, but if the whole article is full of typos it can be distracting. Some of your readers may just stop reading if the article is littered with typos, which we don't want to happen.  

THERE IS NO NEED TO BE “WRITERS”: OK, I know I mentioned format and proof reading, but really, you don't need to be a writer. You don't need to be fancy and use big words. You don't need to know when to use or not use a comma. You just need to be clear enough for readers to understand your point.  

PICTURES: Pictures are always interesting. Find a picture online somewhere (which is not subject to copyright), or provide a picture of your own to drive your point. A great place to find pictures that can be shared with reference to the source photo is at the photo site flickr in this section: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/  

SAVING THE DRAFT: It is a good idea to write long articles into a word processor like Word to be sure that your thoughts are kept saved and not lost if your internet connection fails. However Refurber does make auto-saves and if you get interrupted in the middle of writing your advice you can save your article as a draft. You can revisit it later when it is more convenient to you. So don't feel rushed! It is better to put off publishing your article when it is not yet the best it could be, rather than publish a mediocre half-finished one.  

YOU CAN DELETE AN ADVICE: If you wrote an advice that you actually meant to put under "requested advice", no worries! You can delete it.  

EDITING: If you notice a few typos when you revisit your advice please go ahead and edit it! You can edit and re-edit as many times as you would like to improve on and article with new content, improved layout or just to correct spelling errors.