How to make your English article for Habr read tens of thousands of people: 3 simple tips

The English version of Habr has been around for some time. More and more users are trying their hand at translating their Russian-language articles and writing new ones. I write a lot in English for work, and I see some recurring errors that prevent such articles from attracting a large number of readers.

In this topic, I have collected three simple tips for improving the readability of habrastatas and attracting English-speaking readers. I hope it will be useful.
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Adjust the length of the material

There are studies proving that the preferences of speakers of different languages ​​may vary in the length of texts. Of course, the format of the text, as well as platforms for its publication, has a great influence, but certain trends can be highlighted.

So if the Russian-speaking public - contrary to popular belief - reads longridas and medium-length texts (around 15 thousand characters), then for sites of the same category (in particular, IT) in English are more popular as shorter articles - 5- 10 thousand characters. At the same time, it is impossible to say that no one reads exactly all long articles.



Source: my research (if interested - I can share the link in the comments)

The popularity of articles of different lengths on the IT site ZDNet.com

The conclusion from this follows: if you are sure that your material is “bombarding”, then translate it as is. If you have any doubts, try to reduce it without losing meaning - it will make life easier for readers.

Work on readability

According to statistics, poor grammar is one of the most annoying factors for native speakers. So, according to a survey of the Dictionary.com resource, in which more than 2 million Americans took part, about 59% more than grammatical errors enrage online published texts.

Therefore, if you are not 100% sure of your grammar, and you do not have the opportunity to involve a native speaker in reading the text (this is ideal), you should use a specialized software. The easiest way is to install the free grammar checker extension directly into the browser; Textly.AI extends well for this.



It also does not hurt to ease the language itself. In Russian for this, it is often recommended to use the Glavred service, in English you can study the recommendations of the Hemingway tool - it will highlight complex and very complex sentences that can be simplified, write down the readability assessment.

Yourself do PR your habrasteti

At the moment, there are not enough foreign audiences at Habré itself, so that any post in English has a chance to collect some impressive number of views. Therefore, we should all help our favorite resource and try to attract readers to our content on our own. This can be done with the help of reposts (or as seeding marketing specialists say) links to your article on various English-language resources.

The most obvious place for this is a resource called Hacker News . This is an aggregator of links to articles of technological orientation. The project was launched by one of the most famous start-up incubators Y Combinator, it is visited by more than 13 million people.



News.ycombinator.com homepage

Good technical articles have all the chances to get home and get traffic, comparable to the fact that on Habré receive high-quality Russian-language publications.

Do not forget Reddit. It is, in fact, an aggregator-social network, divided into many subsections (subreddits) with its own audience. Not all of them can publish links, only text articles are allowed somewhere, but you can easily select several sections for PR of your article. This can be done using a simple Google query like «/ + subreddit» - you will immediately be shown many articles listing the necessary subsections.

Some useful sabreddit for IT publications:

• / r / netsec - dedicated to the topic of information security, 295 thousand subscribers, there is a less popular analogue / r / cybersecurity
• / r / programming - everything is clear from the name, 1.8 million subscribers
• / r / opensource - about 70 thousand subscribers, everything is about open sources

There are a bunch of subdits on marketing, project management, usability and design - reddit covers all the topics we write about in Habré. As a result, the publication in Hacker News + several thematic subreddits may well bring several tens of thousands of readers.

I hope the tips will be useful, supplement the material in the comments. If you have questions, I will be glad to answer them.