Writing for the Web
Structuring documents for a new medium
8/10/98
Let's face it. The Web has a reputation for crappy writing.
So what are we going to do about it? The first step in any recovery program is an awareness of the problem. We're lucky. Most of us have already figured out that we have a problem and can move past this awkward stage without embarrassment, arrest, or bodily harm.
Like any good 12-step program, this article will offer brief tips you can use in real life. And here's the perk: there are only 5 steps to wade through.
Let's get started with that most popular of Web maxims: Know your audience.
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 (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html) 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.
Be True to the Content
Let's get one thing straight: all web sites are not the same. Neither are all books, newspapers, or brochures. You wouldn't expect the obituaries to be written the same way as the sports pages, or a textbook to read like a war novel. Writing for any medium is first and foremost about doing the right thing for the content.
Content is undeniably king in users' minds, and how you structure it for the Web affects how it is perceived. More than one really great article has been compromised by poor web editing decisions or by unreadable presentation. More than one really dumb topic has been elevated to greatness by fine prose and a thoughtful layout.
Tone: how you say it matters
A large part of being true to the content has to do with striking the right tone. On the Web, things are generally pretty chatty and familiar. It's a casual medium, for the most part, for which we have thousands of web homesteaders to thank. Does this mean everything written for the Web needs to be homey and conversational?
To some degree, yes. That conversational tone is a convention of this medium. However, it's not suited to every topic, and that's where things fall into confusion. What the Web's conversational tone offers is approachability. There is a dark side, though, in that casual writing seems by nature less trustworthy than formal, academic writing. Given two similar articles on writing for the Web, for example, which would you trust more: this casual, conversational one or one with a formal, academic tone? The research behind each article might be the same, but the presentation will suggest otherwise.
Writing for different genres
Being true to the content also means understanding when to structure something as an information piece and when to structure it for exploration, discovery, or sensation. There are many beautiful bits of poetry and literature on the Web, but you would never know it. More often than not, these gems are in the wrong setting. They're simply dumped onto a screen without consideration of their purpose or nature. What should feel meditative or uplifting feels like reading a stock update.
Some writers are reaching beyond shovelware to explore how to frame web content in ways other than the information/archive model. Derek Powazek is one of them. Derek's site, the fray, features personal stories contributed by many writers. Derek takes great care in structuring and presenting these stories to their best effect. The stories are written for the Web, structured for the Web, and presented on the Web as unique creations.
Make It Scannable
When something is scannable, it means you can easily scan it for key points. This is an important feature for textbooks, magazines, newspapers, and especially for information sites on the Web (where attention spans are infamously short).
How do you make something scannable? It involves adding document features such as headers, lists, or pullout quotes. Often this happens during the editing stage instead of the writing stage.
Headers show topic coverage
Imagine if the text of this article were laid out in one long file. Now imagine that the section headings and subheadings were stripped out. How would you tell whether this article includes a discussion of pullout quotes? How would you tell where that discussion was within the article, and how much time was devoted to it? Without header structures, you would have to read the article to be sure.
The longer a document, the more you'll need headers to communicate what topics you've covered. In a textbook, there might be chapter titles, top-level headings within the chapter, and subheads within the top-level headings. In this article, there are section headings for the five main points (for example, "Make It Scannable") and subheadings within each main point (for example, "Headers show topic coverage").
Header style varies depending on what is called "house style." In most cases, top-level headers are shown by using larger type and by making the first letter of header words uppercase (for example, "Make It Scannable"). Subheadings usually are smaller in size and appear without uppercase letters (as in "Headers show topic coverage"). Occasionally, italic type is used to subheadings or categories within subheadings.
Lists make multiple concepts clear
Bulleted lists can dramatically improve a document's scannability. They offer:
You can see from this example that lists are a powerful way to communicate multiple points rapidly and clearly. If I had instead written
Bulleted lists can dramatically improve a document's scannability. They offer an easily digested overview of key points, differentiation between key points and the rest of the text, and a concise format.
Pullout quotes offer content teasers
By pulling out brief, relevant quotes from the text, you can offer an added level of scannability to your documents. The pullout quote on this page probably grabbed your attention immediately and told you something about how the topic would be presented.
Choosing which quote (or quotes) to pull out is more art form than science. Try to pull out a sentence that is both catchy (since one function of a pullout is to capture a reader's attention) and relevant. Pulling out a quote that is not relevant or only peripherally relevant to the section's content can be misleading, so be careful what you choose. Keep the pullout quote brief, even if it means editing back some of the original sentence it is based on. Scannability is built on concise, clear language, so an overly wordy pullout quote won't help your readers.
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:
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.
Edit Ruthlessly
This is my favorite step in content development: methodically separating the wheat from the chaff. It's also one of the most difficult steps in the process, mainly because it can require trashing someone else's painfully constructed words.
For the Web, editing is a crucial step in the content development process. There's only one best approach: show no mercy. Every idea, word, or sentence might seem wonderfully appealing, but to create documents that work on the Web, you'll need to ruthlessly cut some of them back.
Dumbing down or cleaning up?
People don't read as much on the Web as they do in print (according to Jakob Nielsen, they read 25% slower as well) . They can't or won't absorb the same amount of information. Something has to go. You've taken the care to understand your audience, construct your content, and make your document scannable and concise. Take the time to evaluate the text you're left with, and strip away what is not needed for meaning or style.
To be very honest, this sometimes means "dumbing down" your text. As bad as the term sounds, that is occasionally what's called for. This does not necessarily mean that the civilized world is in danger of collapsing. It does mean that where appropriate to your audience and purpose, you should condense, cut, and generally clean up--and you should do it unashamedly. Making a difficult concept clear to a large audience is a worthy skill, especially in this medium.
Jennifer Fleming is an Anchor producer and the author of the upcoming book Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience (O'Reilly, 1998). She runs Square Circle Solutions, a Boston-based web firm specializing in user experience consulting and idea generation.
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