: Re: What´s the best path to writing a blog about technology? I've been reading a book about how to write from the really ground up, but this book doesn't teach how to compound a chapter. I wanna

@BetL639

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One of the inherent challenges you will face in converting a serialized approach to information (blog, published articles etc) into a book is that episodic articles or blogs are, or should be, largely self-contained.

That is, each article or blog post can stand on its own as a piece of writing - though concepts touched on in a previous article or post may be needed, if a reader comes to article 4 of 5 and has enough general knowledge of the topic, they shouldn't have to return to the earlier post for the current article to read as a whole piece, to be satisfying and feel complete.

Although chapters can have a certain stand-alone quality, and can be used as an information category organizing tool, there should, in a book, be enough flow; that is, enough ties from one concept to the next, building from one proposition or explanation to the next, that there is a discrete and effective narrative or conceptual arc which brings the reader through from a lower level of comprehension or sophistication to a higher level.

This is a struggle many technical writers face today, as much of our content is now created using a modality called "single-sourcing" or "topic-based writing", in which discrete chunks are created as "topics", in order to be re-used in multiple places or articles whilst being maintained and edited only in the original topic. This minimizes both rework and error.

This is of course ideal for online help systems and other digital consumption tools.

However, as a result, creating "flow" for longer articles or books per se requires adding transitions or conceptual framework elements to help tie related concepts together in a cogent and progressive fashion.

It's by no means impossible, or even that hard, but it's a structural issue with episodic to long form conversion which you should consider and have a content framework or model in mind for before you start to write content.

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