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The Reproof Blog
on the craft of writing and rewriting.
How to get people to search for your product
or rather, how to figure out what people are searching and get your product to show up there.
People don’t want your product. They sure didn’t want Zapier, an app automation tool, which on its own is about as useful as a gear—indispensable as part of a machine, merely dead weight without the o…
A Markdown Cheat Sheet
Markdown italics and bold text and code blocks and checkboxes and more
It all started in 2004 when John Gruber introduced Markdown as "Email-style writing for the web." Computing started with plain text, typewriter-style, with letters and symbols and little else. You cou…
How to write a really good roundup.
How the Zapier team wrote software roundups that brought in millions of views, every year.
You don’t want the second best, the runner up, the thing that’s good enough but not quite great. You want the best. So we Google “best this” and “best that.” The teams that answer those questions stan…
Always make three, or more. Never fewer.
How to find the best take on an idea.
The first thing you make is always terrible. Inevitably, irredeemably, wad-it-up-and-throw-it-in-the-trash bad. You’ll pick the wrong color, write the wrong opening line, add the wrong ingredient, sta…
Strikethrough and the power of defaults
who wouldn’t want to be king?
☐ Mark Revisions That was all it said, the box that foretold the death of proofreading marks. Nearly a decade into the word processor wars, Microsoft—already in 1989 “the nation’s largest personal sof…
How Strikethrough took over the world.
We invented a whole library of proofreading marks, then the strikethrough took over them all.
The first Office tools came on tablets in Mesopotamia. For there, in the cradle of civilization, they “patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet,” as a Sumerian poem related. Mesopotamians d…
Write what you wish others had written.
Answer your questions, then document the answer for others.
It all started with an obstinate printer, and an early adopter desperate to leave Vista behind for the promised land of Windows 7. The printer, naturally enough, didn’t want to play along. Google held…
Copying is the best way to start.
Get your fingers and mind moving, and the words will start flowing.
There are two easiest ways to start running: Set out from the top of a hill, or take a dog for a run. The former sets you up for success; on a hill, one foot in front of another quickly builds enough …
The best way to write? Rewrite.
The trick to writing is writing the same idea over and again.
Intros are the hardest thing to write. It's rare for me to overthink a random paragraph halfway through an article, beyond keeping an eye on rhythm and repetition. Conclusions are easy enough to write…
Write in Markdown. Use HTML for everything else.
Sometimes simple isn't easier.
Four characters versus 18. That's the difference between adding double asterisks around text to make it bold with Markdown with two asterisks versus adding HTML's <strong>strong tags</strong&…
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