Using a recipe is beneficial because there is an exact order you need to follow for everything to come out the way its supposed to. It's easy to know when each step ended and the next one began. The tough part is getting all the details appropriately into each step. Everything has to be explained either through text or a photo, even if it seems like something that is common sense. For your article you can take photos of the steps using a phone camera. If your photos don't turn out as well as you had hoped they would, try switching to a new camera. This will allow for your photos to be of better quality. Be aware that some photos will develop a strong blue tint using a phone camera such as the Galaxy S3 and can be adjusted on Photoshop so that they are usable.
Making a how to article is good practice for being a clear and concise writer. You will gain knowledge and have a better understanding of how to write to an audience after creating this article as well as being able to explain and have someone follow a process with ease. Trying to make the directions simple while still communicating everything the reader needs to know was can be a real challenge. You will notice that when you're making food you don't want to have to read a lot or sift through lots of information. It's distracting to actually making something.
This article is a good way to see how other people interpreted your writing. Throughout the writing process you may write numerous drafts for your recipe. It may to be helpful to have a friend read over your recipe first to see if the steps made sense and were easy to follow. Next you will want them actually try to make your recipe which can a big and influential part of your experience. You will able to watch him or her read through the directions and then follow the steps to the best of their ability. You will want the instructions to make sense and it's beneficial to know if they would be easy to follow without the picture first. You can make clarifications on certain steps and elaborate on others.
When it came to deciding how to take the pictures you want them to be in a more functional role rather than just aesthetically nice looking photos. It would be best to take most of the pictures of what the step looked like when it was done. That way people can be able to compare what their tortilla roll ups looked like to yours. Of course you want your pictures to look good too but you don't want them to show something basic like spreading the cream cheese. People wouldn't need to see that but instead how the completed step looks. That way for steps like spreading the cream cheese you could see how close the cream cheese was spread to the edge of the tortilla shell or how it was evenly spread out without any globs in the middle.
After everything is set with your recipe and photos you will have to do the coding. It is interesting that wikiHow uses its own system for coding. It seems to be unnecessary and they could have made a simpler system for coding. Seeing as how they immediately changed everything about my articles format I don't know why they would offer a setting that allows you to write your own code. If a site is going to go through the trouble of rewriting so many articles, before it even makes it to the public stage to be contributed to, then they should say here is exactly how we want you to do a recipe or an activity.
You use the guides they offer on wikiHow to help with your coding. You still may find it to be difficult to get everything on the first try or even after a couple tries. You need to consistently attempt their instructions then hit the preview button to check what you had just done. You may find yourself going back to the guideline and rereading the instructions for coding again. You will eventually get everything the way you want it to look including having the steps numbered correctly and having a bullet list for certain steps such as baking instructions and for the tips sections. Another problem with this site is the coding was never saved upon reentry to the site. All progress was transferred to the normal editing or just deleted. You may find this very annoying.
While writing your article you may want to preview other articles on wikiHow to get an idea of how it should look and how others have written their articles. You may find an article that has a recipe that is similar to yours but may not be the same in serving sizes and uses different ingredients. You may also find articles for an appetizer which can potentially give some good ideas. You can search for a third article about how to follow any recipe which can act as a good guide to think about while writing your own article.
Writing a wikiHow article has its ups and downs. Some may say that their experience wasn't the most user friendly site but was a good exercise for writing.
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