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I was approached the other day and was asked if I could write a tutorial on HOW to write a tutorial. I'm writing this tutorial as a way to help the budding tutorial writer, hopefully I will do it justice. I also have a feeling that this tutorial might be constantly updated as I am always learning new things. This isn't going to go step by step as every tutorial writer has their own way of doing things ~~ I can only tell you how I write a tutorial and give some guidelines. There really isn't a "right" way to write a tut but there are a lot of wrong ways to write one. I will be going over all of those in a little bit. What holds someone back from writing a tutorial? We create things all of the time while using PSP ~~ whether we are doing group activities or just plain playing around, so why not let others know how you accomplished what you did? One of the biggest things that held me back was fear. Fear of the unknown, plus a lack of confidence. Who would want to try one of MY tutorials? What if I do something wrong? What if I forget to tell them an important step? What if nobody likes my tutorials? Then I started thinking, hmmmm, maybe I CAN write a tutorial BUT I don't think I'll put my thoughts into words very well. What about all that copyright stuff and other things that I see on other tutorials. I don't know HOW to write a tutorial, maybe someday when I learn I'll do it. Does any of that sound familiar to you? If the answer is yes, then you are in the right place. Writing a tutorial isn't that hard but there is a lot of work involved. I'm going to start off by giving you a brief history of my PSP life, I will then go through some DO's and DON'Ts in tutorial writing, followed by exactly what I do when I am thinking of a tutorial. I'm going to give you a little of my history with PSP and how I learned to do different things. Please bear with me. I'll try not to get too carried away with the rest of this but I do want you to know where I am coming from, when I started, and what I do now. Let's start at the beginning when I first started using PSP, and not knowing a thing about it. I had seen a lot of tags and animated globes and I wanted to know how to do this. So the end of February, this year, I downloaded the trial version and fell in love with it! My birthday was in March and my darling Larry got me the boxed version for my birthday! I soon discovered tutorials and then I discovered Yahoo Groups for PSP. They were a Godsend, let me tell you. They helped me learn different ways to use PSP and made me less afraid to try different things. I also discovered early on that there were some good tutorials and there were also some really bad ones. I tried to keep all of that in mind when I started writing tutorials. I joined group after group, as I am sure you all have done especially at the beginning of your PSP experience. In these groups I found more tutorials plus the weekly WETs, Graphics, Tubes, etc., etc. I got to learn and I got to play and I became inundated with e-mail! LOL Yes, I did have to quit some of the groups and eventually if you want to be serious about PSP and writing tutorials you will too. The e-mail just gets to be too much. As you know most of my tutorials revolve around frames, backgrounds, and what you can do with graphics. When I would get a weekly Challenge or Wet I would play and experiment. Of course I never wrote down what I did, and I used the Undo button a LOT **giggle** and then one day when someone thought something was really exceptional that I had sent in, they said, "You should do a tutorial on how you did that." I never thought I could ever be in the same "class" as a tutorial writer but I did start writing down what I did do with those challenges. I also started a notebook where I keep notes on different inner bevels, cutouts, drop shadows, hints and tips that I have found along the way. Every time I see a graphic or do a challenge I try to remember to pay close attention to what I am doing as it is a possible upcoming tutorial for me. Remember that everything you do in PSP is a possible tutorial and write everything down. On to Do's and Don'ts
Tutorial written and created by Patti Wavinak
for Moon's Designs. These Tutorials are copyrighted by law. You may
LINK to them only. You may not remove any of the graphics, zip files
or html within these pages to reproduce these Tutorials, without the
expressed permission of Moon's Designs. These pages may not be removed
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