Describing thoroughly the nature of an activity as writing an article in general is going to take us a long way because the phrase writing an article in general sense of the term covers a wide scope of types of writing, language usage and many more things which distinguish one kind of article writing from another.

Before we start elaborating on the kinds of articles, we will first define the term. What is an article in the most general sense of the term? The answer is simpler than the question; an article is textual body written with the purpose of giving information to the reader.

Now when we speak about writing an article in general, there is an array of differences between one kind of article and another. There are also various types of articles distinguished according to these differences.

One of them is the language used in the article. An article can be written in a simple easy-to-grasp kind of language when giving information which will be helpful in circumstances happening in everyday life. However, an article written with the purpose to describe scientific phenomena or the article is of scientific content of every kind this kind of articles are written in a more scientific language not graspable to people not really drawn to the field of science described in the article.

Another thing in which articles differ, speaking for all kinds of written articles in general, is the length. When describing an event in the newspapers, the articles are of the length necessary to describe that event from all possible aspects, and in the daily press we usually encounter articles which are not very long, only containing the important highlights of an event because a newspaper is a kind of daily informative press read by people of all ages and occupations and they do not have the time to dedicate a half an hour or so to one article only. The newspaper articles serve to inform the citizen on the daily events from many aspects (business, crime, politics, events on local, regional and global level), plus to entertain the reader by a page of astrology and a crossword puzzle.

Another factor of distinction of the articles is the content. According to their content we have argumentative, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, controversial and persuasive articles.

What a good article writer has to bear in mind when writing articles in general is that the article is an informative text body written with the purpose to inform, learn and entertain the reader.