Writing for the Web, Continued

Be Direct and Descriptive

In fiction, a writer can take paragraphs to set a scene, pages to chart a plot, and an entire book to make one point. You could never get away with this same studied behavior in writing for information sites. On the Web, unless you are writing novels or poetry, you'll need to be direct and concise. You'll also need to be descriptive. As a college professor of mine once put it, "Never use a big, difficult word if you can use a small, clear word. Never confuse if you can clarify."

Being direct and descriptive means looking at how you structure sentences and what words and labels you choose, but it also has to do with how you structure your entire document. There are two helpful models we can borrow from: the newspaper model and the research paper model.

The newspaper model
Writing for the Web is often compared to writing for newspapers. In journalism, an inverted pyramid represents how you should write: give readers the "meat" up front (the largest layer of the pyramid), then a layer of supporting detail, and finally, any other minor details that may be of interest.

The reason for this seemingly upside-down structure is that newspaper readers tend to want to read through top stories quickly, getting the most important facts and moving on. Web readers tend to behave in a similar way, largely because reading on the screen is uncomfortable for many of us. Structure web content so that the meatiest parts appear early on, unless you don't mind if readers ricochet back into the search engine they came from.

The research paper model
A good research paper also has lessons we can use on the Web. Generally, proper form for most research papers is:

• tell what you will be explaining
• explain it
• review what you explained

Though the wordiness, length, and detail of most research papers makes them an imperfect model for web writing, this Preview > Tell > Review structure is well worth borrowing. Rather than letting readers guess at what's to come, tell them explicitly. Writing for information sites should not be a mysterious affair, and impatient web users won't put up with it.

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