One of my pet peaves is reading an online article that claims to
provide useful information but is just a meandering piece of fluff. As
opposed to just writing a tirade as if I were some kind of blogger,
this article will discuss ways to avoid adding more unwanted fluff to
our lives.

Contents:

• What is fluff?
• How to fight fluff.
  • Don’t lie in describing the article.
  • Organize the article.
  • Research the topic.
  • Know when to throw away an article.
  • Let your readers moderate your article.
  • Don’t blog while drunk.
• Summary

What is fluff?

Fluff is definitely in the eye of the beholder. One person’s audience
participation theater is another person’s waste of time, e.g. WWE
wrestling. Fluff isn’t really the problem. It’s the writers who try to
pass off fluff articles as something with substance.

How to fight fluff.

Don’t lie in describing the article.

This is the biggest cause of wasted time. So many articles promise to
reveal great mysteries and to enhance your life, but they don’t live up
to their grandious claims. If you are rambling about some software you
installed, don’t try to pass it off as a product evaluation. Your
writing might be terribly entertaining, but don’t make me skim through
five pages of witticisms looking for a few hard facts. Obviously, many
commercial webzines benefit financially from lying about the contents
of their articles, and they would scoff at my suggestions, since their
job is just to sell ads.

Organize the article.

If you are writing anything of considerable size, it is very helpful to
organize it with paragraph headings or even a table of contents. Also,
don’t try to be funny in your table of contents. I was tempted to use a
bunch of cute taglines in the table of contents, but that wouldn’t help
the reader fight fluff. The Nvu HTML editor
has a nice feature for generating tables of contents for you. I used to
really love Tom’s Hardware for being able to jump to the conclusion of
a product evaluation immediately, since I wouldn’t always need to read
several pages of statistics myself. Unfortunately, Tom’s Hardware has
so many flashing banner ads, that I don’t even want to add a link to
their site on mine.

Research the topic.

In my defense, I spent a whole 5 minutes searching google for
information on writing articles. However, I mainly found generic
academic guidelines for writing. Maybe this is why there is so much
redundancy in blogs. Searching for abstract concepts is hard, but
ranting is easy.

Know when to throw away an article.

At this point, I have only written three, now four, tips on how to
fight fluff. The question I should be asking myself is, “Would anybody
else actually benefit from four measly tips, or should I just accept
the fact that the google ads are the most useful part of my blog.”

Let your readers moderate your article.

Wouldn’t it be nice if slashdot didn’t just let you filter out comments with a low score but also let you filter out articles that are subpar. I guess the Alexa toolbar
does this already, but this still could be a useful feature to add to
blog software, or you could just read your flame mail, since it’s
really only constructive criticism from concerned readers.

Don’t blog while drunk.

It really is only funny to you, unless, of course, you completely embarrass yourself by exposing your deepest feelings.

Summary

This article isn’t anywhere near as useful as I first anticipated, but
I think it will help me in structuring my future posts. This is my
first blog entry, so I am still trying to decide if it is cool if I get
“first post”.