Best Practices for Writing on DEV: Tone of Voice

Hey again, Sloan here! 🦥

We’re sharing some tips for success when it comes to writing on DEV. If you’ve been looking to improve your technical writing skills, make the most of DEV as a blogging platform, and take your content to the next level — this series is for you!

The first two posts in the series were about creating a series and formatting. This one is about tone of voice, and the next one is about topics. Let's get started!

Tone of Voice

When it comes to writing, your tone of voice is the manner in which you’re speaking to the audience. In order to succeed on DEV, we recommend writing with a tone of voice that is friendly, inclusive, and non-condescending.

To learn more about how to utilize tone of voice in content writing, check out this awesome resource from the Nielsen Norman Group!

Title

Your post’s title is your first chance to make a good impression! A lot of factors come into play when deciding on the perfect post title.

If you are interested in optimizing your content for search engines, you might have learned how to stuff your title with keywords. The truth is, while these things might make your content more likely to be visible to search engines…they sometimes make them less appealing for your human readers.

If you’re trying to catch users’ attention, you might lead with a big claim to bait your readers to click (you know…clickbait). While this seems like a good idea, and sometimes works to get those initial clicks, readers will be disappointed when they get to your article and realize that there actually isn’t “One Amazing JavaScript Trick That Will Blow Your Mind, Change Your Life, and Automate Your Laundry!”

We recommend using a title that sparks curiosity, but is true to the content. We also recommend limiting use of emoji in your title for accessibility reasons — you can learn more about that from this article from Accessible Social.

Be yourself

The best way to add some personality to your content is to let your own personality shine through and speak from your own experience. It’s much more engaging to read a story about how you created your first Ruby gem than a generic explainer on creating a gem that’s copy and pasted from the docs.

Being yourself also means not being a robot in the literal sense. Here at DEV, we’re just as excited (and a little scared 😅) about ChatGPT as you are! That’s why we wrote a set of guidelines for AI-assisted content on DEV. Check them out at the link below:

Be inclusive

In order to make DEV a safe, fun, and helpful place for all developers, we take inclusivity very seriously. In short, we ask that you abide by our Code of Conduct, use inclusive language, and not make assumptions about community members’ gender identities or pronouns.

If you’re interested in fostering inclusivity on the web, we recommend checking out the Self-Defined dictionary.

Is it kind, necessary, and true?

I like to use this three-prong test to decide whether or not to share a particular communication:

• Is it kind? In other words, is it stated in a way that’s friendly, inclusive, and assumes good intentions?
• Is it necessary? In other words, does it need to be said for the reader to understand my point?
• Is it true? In other words, am I conveying information that I know to be true without misleading the reader?

With these tips in mind, you can’t go wrong when it comes to tone of voice in your writing on DEV. Happy writing! The next installment of this series will be about topics.