Advice on how to organize an article

The article What causes the ‘Your Hardware Settings Have Changed’ issue on Windows 10? is very poorly organized.

In the introduction the article explains two possible causes of the issue. This introduction is well written and provides useful, and relevant, information.

After the introduction is a Note heading. The first paragraph in this section begins as follows: “If the given solutions don’t work for you, you will have to stop Windows from updating your device drivers”.

At this point many readers will begin screaming at you in rage because you have not said a single word about how to solve the problem, you just explained what is causing the problem.

Next comes several paragraphs that explain how to “stop Windows from updating your device drivers”.

This Note section ends with the ominous warning: here be dragons. The problem is that the impatient reader who is desperately trying to get their laptop working again may never even get this far because they may have followed the instructions on how to “stop Windows from updating your device drivers” and seeing that the issue has gone away closed the web page.

It is only if you continue scrolling down the page past the ominous warning that you find the solutions. Of course some readers will never see the solution because they stopped reading after following the instructions to “stop Windows from updating your device drivers”.

This article should have been organized as follows.

  1. Causes
  2. Solutions
  3. If the given solutions don’t work for you…

The way the article is presented just pisses the reader off. It may also cause them to try the alternative without ever being aware that the article actually does suggest solutions.

Don’t be like Kevin. Please use a logical order for your articles.

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One thought on “Advice on how to organize an article

  1. Thank you Kevin. After following the advice in your article my laptop is working correctly again and I did not need to “stop Windows from updating your device drivers”. I am still annoyed with you. You really should have given the solutions before the Note section!

    Like

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