Guide Article

A guide article is a long-form page that takes a reader through one task or decision from start to finish, in the order they would do it. Its unit is the step; each step is a heading and the passage that completes it.

Guide and answer page

An answer page exists for one question and is finished when that question is answered. A guide exists for a sequence: what to check first, what follows from the result, what to do at the end. The two are not competitors. A guide whose steps are each written as a question with its answer isolated beneath it is a set of answer pages joined in order, and an assistant can lift any one step without the rest. A guide written as a continuous essay, where the third step only makes sense after reading the second, gives the assistant nothing it can take on its own, however thorough the whole.

Structure a crawler can follow

Headings do the work. The h2 for each step names the step in the words a person would use to ask about it, and the level below is used only for parts of that step, so the heading list alone reads as the procedure. Where the guide describes a fixed procedure with materials and an order, HowTo markup can restate the steps for a machine, though the visible headings are what get quoted. Dates belong on anything that will go stale: a price, a rule, a version. And the guide should say what it does not cover, because the boundary of a guide is the first thing a reader with a slightly different problem needs to know.

A common question

Can an assistant quote a single step out of a guide without the rest of it?

Only when the step was written to stand alone. A guide whose steps each pair a heading with an answer isolated beneath it works as a run of small answer pages placed in order, and any one of them can be lifted whole. A guide written as continuous prose, where the third step makes sense only after the second has been read, offers nothing an assistant can take on its own, however thorough the piece is as a whole.

Sources

No external figures are used on this page; the description of step structure follows from how assistants select passages, set out under citability.