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Best Practices for Writing on DEV: Formatting

Sloan the DEV Moderator on April 17, 2023

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 wr...

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Anthony Fung • Apr 17 '23

Any help with these would be greatly appreciated:

I've seen some posts with emojis. How do we enter these? Do we find them and copy/paste?
I add code blocks by adding three backticks above and below any code I add. This works well, but I've noticed that some code blocks have syntax colouring. How would I add that please?

Thanks in advance.

deji adesoga • Apr 17 '23 • Edited

If you want syntax highlighting, you'll have to specify the name of the language after three backticks at the top as seen below:

'''javascript
import './App.css';
import Todo from './components/Todo';

function App() {
return (

);
}
export default App;
'''

P.S
I made use of single quotes instead of the backticks so you can fully understand the context of my explanation.

Anthony Fung • Apr 18 '23

Thanks Deji!

Do you know if there's a list of languages somewhere that I can reference? e.g. if I wanted to check if it's c# or csharp, or something else I hadn't thought of.

deji adesoga • Apr 19 '23

Yes actually. You can check out the link to the Github repo below, which shows a list of languages for corresponding syntax highlighting.

github.com/jincheng9/markdown_supp...

Anthony Fung • Apr 19 '23

Thanks again!

deji adesoga • Apr 19 '23

Sure, you're welcome.

Samuel Braun • Apr 18 '23 • Edited

If you are on Windows you can press Windows+. (winkey+point) for emojis 😋

Anthony Fung • Apr 18 '23

Thanks Samuel! Looks like there are lots of useful symbols there too👍

CaixiangyangCD • Apr 19 '23

Erin Bensinger • Apr 18 '23

For emoji, I use a Mac app called Rocket. As a professional Social Media Manager, it makes the emoji part of my job a lot easier! If you're not on a Mac, I'm sure there are other options out there.

I also recommend Emojipedia for copy-paste needs. It's comprehensive and very informative as it relates to accessibility concerns.

Anthony Fung • Apr 18 '23

Thanks Erin!

I'm on Windows, but Emojipedia certainly looks really useful - being able to search seems like a huge timesaver.

Erin A Olinick • Apr 17 '23 • Edited

This is super helpful. Thanks for the a11y resources for online content best practices. Please share any others that you reference often or that you think would be useful!

Ben Sinclair • Apr 19 '23

I think the other big one is not to use screenshots of code. You know, things like snippets made with Carbon.

Rachel Fazio • Apr 17 '23

YAY! Love to see this

Kev the Dev • Apr 18 '23

I like to use ChatGPT to proofread my posts which often helps with formatting!

Sloan the DEV Moderator • Apr 18 '23

Don't forget to follow our Guidelines for AI-assisted Articles 😉

Guidelines for AI-assisted Articles on DEV

Erin Bensinger for The DEV Team ・ Dec 19 '22 ・ 4 min read

#meta #chatgpt #writing #abotwrotethis

Thomas Broyer • Apr 19 '23

Hey @sloan, I'm not a native-English speaker but shouldn't that be heading rather than header?

Sloan the DEV Moderator • Apr 21 '23

OMG. You're totally right — I am a native English speaker, but clearly it's hard for us too 😆 I'll edit this. Thanks for the note.

Chiamaka Ojiyi • Apr 19 '23 • Edited

Thanks for sharing. How do I create a series on dev.to and display the series links in subposts on that same series. Just like you have done in this post

Sloan the DEV Moderator • Apr 21 '23

Hey Chiamaka! You can learn how to do that from this recent post:

Best Practices for Writing on DEV: Creating a Series

Sloan the DEV Moderator for The DEV Team ・ Apr 17 ・ 2 min read

#meta #writing