Writing for the Web, Continued

Know Your Audience

Are you serving youth or university professors? Obviously, the way you write depends a lot on who you're writing for. Tone, style, length, and vocabulary should conform to your audience's abilities and expectations.

For example, here in Boston, we have two major newspapers. Why would anyone need two newspapers, even in a large city like Boston? One paper resembles The New York Times, featuring long articles and reasonably thorough coverage. The other resembles USA Today. It's a skinny, portable newspaper with brief stories and a somewhat limited vocabulary. Both newspapers are popular and doing well. There's room for both, because they serve two different audiences.

Good writing is relative
Jakob Nielsen has done usability studies that show that people are not comfortable reading on the Web, and that they read on average 25% slower than in print. Does this mean you should dumb everything down, chop everything back, and generally strip your documents down to the core points?

If you're writing for a mass market, that may be necessary. However, don't make that mistake if you're writing for the research or scholarly communities. Instead focus on structuring your documents for scannability and on building in tools like abstracts and summaries that will help this audience make decisions about what they will read.

Finding out what your audience needs
So how do you find out that a researcher needs detailed text and a helpful summary, or that a ten-year-old needs clarity, liveliness, and brevity? You'll need to do a little research.

The best way to begin is to look at other things your audience reads. Are there magazines that they tend to subscribe to? Books they tend to read? Looking at these materials, see if you can find common traits in how information is presented. Are subheads common? What vocabulary is preferred? What else can you learn?

Don't stop at what your audience reads, however. Look at other ways they find information. For example, if a university researcher uses a tool or database in their work, what can that tool tell you about how the researcher wants to approach information? If a teenager gets most of their information from friends, what does that tell you about convenience or trust? Combined with an understanding of web readability and scannability, these discoveries will become part of the way you structure information for different audiences.

Once you've taken the time to understand the audience, you'll want to do the same for the content. We'll cover that in the next step: Be true to the content.

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