Writing well for the web
January 19, 2007
Contributing Writer: Tim North, http://www.BetterWritingSkills.com
Reading from the screen is harder than reading printed information. In part this is because the resolutions of existing display technologies (CRT and LCD monitors) are much lower than the resolution of printed material. This makes it harder – and consequently slower -- to read online
As a result, online readers scan material in an attempt to quickly determine if it's relevant to them. This suggests that we should make our online documents as "scan friendly" as possible.
Material written for print, though, often starts with an introduction and builds slowly towards the main argument. Conclusions and recommendations are usually placed at the end.
This traditional structure is the opposite of that needed by online readers. Online readers want "the good stuff" up front so they can quickly determine if the document is relevant to them. This point alone should be reason enough to justify the following comment:
You can't take what you wrote for paper, paste it into an HTML editor, mark it up with a few tags and call it an on-screen document.
You need to write specifically for the screen if you want to take best advantage of the medium.
Dan Bricklin (gooddocuments.com)
When writing for an online audience we must restructure our documents so that they are amendable to scanning. Summaries, recommendations and conclusions (i.e. the good stuff) should be brought to the front where possible. Subsequent paragraphs build on this material.
This is similar to the style used by journalists and is sometimes called an inverted-pyramid structure.
Up-front summaries are one excellent way of providing a scan-friendly overview of your document. The following page provides an example of how they can be included: http://www.scribe.com.au/tip-w022.html (This is a link to one an informative article on choosing between "which" and "that".)
These summaries need not be extensive. Indeed, given the preference of online readers for brevity, it might be best if they were not.
The summaries should simply be sufficient to let readers decide whether or not they wish to read on or look elsewhere.
Note that if you are including a description meta tag with your pages, you can reuse the same text as part or all of your summary. This prevents a duplication of effort.
An additional advantage of an up-front summary on your page is that not all search engines display the text provided in the description meta tag. Instead, many display the first 20 or so words on the page. If your page starts with a summary, then this has a good chance of being the text displayed.
Summaries are not needed on every page, of course, but many pages will become more scan friendly if they're included.
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You'll find many more helpful tips
like these in Tim North's much applauded range of e-books. More
information is available on his web site, and all books come with a
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http://www.BetterWritingSkills.com
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Writing well for the web
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