Being the first in an occasional series of notes on how to use Everything2 — how to write around here, how to customize E2, and so forth. This represents nothing more than my own thoughts. Don't imagine that this represents anything beyond my own personal opinions and observations, and in particular don't assume that this represents the views of any other member of the editorial staff.
On writing good factuals
There is art in factual content. Everything2 welcomes all sorts of writing — fiction, poetry, recipes, travelogues, and anything else that any of our contributors want to share with us. But a large portion of the writing on Everything2 is factual in nature. We love to talk about history, about literature, about science. But there's one detail that isn't shared enough — your writing matters when you're writing fact as well as fiction. Writing a really good factual piece, something that people really enjoy reading, takes just as much work as a masterful work of fiction. In this log I've tried to summarize the differences between writing a dull recounting of bare facts and creating a work of art.
Everything2 is not an encyclopedia
They used to call this place "a user-generated encyclopedia of the human experience", or something like that. The problem with that is that it turns out most of us are not capable of writing encyclopedia articles, or at least not very well. Britannica accomplishes the task by having experts in various fields write the pertinent articles, ensuring that expertise underlies the decision of what to include and what not to. Wikipedia does it by writing by committee, which leaves the important decisions to the wisdom of the crowd (or sometimes, the lack thereof.) E2 can't follow either strategy; we don't have many subject matter experts, and authorial control of our content is central to what we do. Encyclopedia-style content isn't very interesting anyway, and it's not to E2's benefit to try to poorly duplicate what Wikipedia does when we're so good at doing what we do.
Instead of writing for an encyclopedia, write for a magazine. Your readers are unlikely to find your factual pieces because they're searching for an exact bit of information. They'd be looking elsewhere if they were. Instead, noders find each other's work by surfing links — new writeups, hardlinks, softlinks. If your writing doesn't capture their attention, it's easy to look elsewhere. You're competing with every other bit of E2, and to win, you'd better be interesting. Give them something they enjoy reading, something they'll care about. Write because you want to explore something fascinating, and you want your readers to be fascinated by it. Your writeup is only valuable insofar as people want to read it, and they won't want to read it if you don't give them a reason to.
Read Bitriot's writeup at Body Farm. You would never find something like that in an encyclopedia. That's the strength of E2 — you can find an encyclopedic article at Wikipedia, and it's probably pretty good. But it won't be as interesting as Bitriot's writeup. Your writeup should be more interesting than the corresponding Wikipedia page. They're around for facts. We're here for good writing.
Draw your reader in
In journalism, the beginning of a newspaper article is called a lede. A lede is the appetizer for the meal that follows, a few morsels of information that lay out what is being discussed and make the reader want more. Don't tell them everything — but give them enough information to be curious about it. There's a reason why you care about the thing you're writing about. Try to convey to the rest of us why you do.
Decompression sickness (DCS) is one of the nastiest maladies that can affect the average scuba diver; its effects are multitudinous, and if you're lucky you'll die rather than be turned into a quadriplegic vegetable.
There. One sentence into the article, and we know that decompression sickness is a disease that affects scuba divers, and that if you get a bad case of it, death results — for the lucky ones. paraclete's opening in this piece caught my attention; it probably caught yours as well. Your first sentence should be like that — you don't have to give an abbreviated overview of the topic, like an encyclopedia would. Instead, you should give a little taste of what follows — tell the reader why they should care enough to keep reading.
Organize your writing
Check out Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus by wertperch. Notice his use of subheadings to organize the content of the writeup. You don't even need explicitly-named subheadings — you can just separate sections with white space, but each section should concentrate on a particular topic. It's easier to follow a piece of writing whose author explicitly concentrates on structure and organization. And remember context; explore the background of what you're discussing so that your readers have the necessary information to relate to the topic. It's probably easiest if you give the background in advance — but make it lively. If your reader feels like they're waiting for the relevant part to start, they'll likely go somewhere else. If you draw the reader's attention to what's interesting about the overall situation, though, and give a few tantalizing facts about your subject before discussing its background, they'll want to read your entire piece.
Tell me a story
A factual piece need not be a simple collection of facts. In fact, it shouldn't be. A good work of non-fiction still operates in much the same way as a piece of fiction. The best factual pieces should inspire emotions and involve bits of humanity. Many pieces of non-fiction writing, on and off E2, tell interesting stories about how a particular thing was discovered, how its discovery impacted the world, why it mattered to the people who studied it. A factual work can examine overall themes; at the risk of appearing immodest, I'd like to discuss my own piece, Aryan. It's both a discussion of the actual Aryans, an ancient culture that split off from the Indo-European culture, and an exploration of the concept of Aryan-ness, the intellectual history of how one particular culture became intertwined with institutional racism. Much of the background information could have been gleaned from hardlinks, but that would mean missing the opportunity to write about the gradual development of the idea and its impact on the world. An encyclopedia would divide that content into two pieces, but for my purposes it was more interesting to look at both concepts as part of one larger work.
Explorations of broader themes underlie a lot of good factual writing. Explicit, encyclopedia-style attention to one topic can mean losing the chance to look at broader ideas or locate a thing within the larger human world. When writing for a narrow audience of experts, you can focus on one specific concept and expect your readers to understand the broad context, but when writing for a general audience, the context can be the most important, most fertile area for discussion. It's okay to duplicate content that exists elsewhere on E2, because, again, E2 is not really an encyclopedia. Your readers are not likely to surf hardlinks to find the background information they need unless they're particularly interested in the topic. Besides, depending on other parts of the database sacrifices the chance to write a more interesting, complete piece.
Write about what you're interested in
Read henotheism in the Bible by hapax for an illustration. Not only does hapax do mountains of research for her nodes, but she also approaches their subjects with background knowledge and expertise, and she writes in an engaging way that demonstrates how much she cares about whatever topic she's covering. Even if you're not personally interested in the subject it covers, this node gives the background you need to understand it, and the context to see why it matters. That's what really makes a piece of factual writing shine, and it's what makes an article interesting to people who aren't all that interested in its subject matter.
You don't have to be an expert on your topic. But focus on things that interest you enough that you'll do the research. The database is never going to be complete. We'll never have a finished version of Everything2 — focusing on "filling in the gaps" without attention to your own interests makes the process less fun and it means your finished product probably won't be very good. Investing a bit of your own passion in what you write ensures that you'll want to study your subject and think about it, and you'll be able to explain to the rest of us why it matters. If you don't care about your topic, chances are very good I won't care when I read it. | 
