Hello, it is June 22, 2008 and welcome to episode 5 of Screen Space. Today’s topic is web writing 101—the very basics of writing text for the web. I am your host, Dr. Jennifer L. Bowie. I am assistant professor at Georgia State University, where I teach in areas related to this podcast such as web design and electronic writing. This podcast is designed for the everyday person who
wants to make their website, blog, or other new media as usable, efficient, and effective as possible.
In this episode, I’ll first present 7 tips for strong basic writing for websites, blogs, and other new media. After the basics, I’ll talk about the idea behind this podcast and also about the development of it. I’ll also introduce the Screen Space Star Rating System.
Today’s topic, web writing 101, is an important one. Most websites, blogs, and other new media don’t function if people can’t or won’t read what you have written. In this episode I’ll just present 7 basic tips. In later episodes, I will present more advanced tips. Although I will call the writing I am talking about throughout this episode “web writing” it is really electronic writing—for the web, blogs, other new media, or anything else that will be read on a computer screen.
- Tip 1: Apply “regular”—i.e. print—writing rules to web writing. All those things you learned in English classes should still come into play when you are writing for the web. Follow basic grammar rules. Edit. Use topic sentences. Think about organization. Consider style and tone. Write for a clear audience, purpose, and context (I’ll talk more about this in a later episode). Follow good writing rules. Remember, unlike print, which for most of us has only a few readers (say that memo at work), your web writing could be read by anyone with an internet connection and the ability to read English. So, if anything, be even more careful with your web writing to follow regular writing rules.
- Tip 2: Keep it concise. This is probably the hardest rule for me, as I like to write long sentence and big paragraphs. I had a two page paragraph in my dissertation before I was told to fix it. A lot of research shows that people do not like to spend much time reading online and many people prefer to skim. Do make reading easy for them. Use shorter sentences and keep your paragraphs short. Try to keep your paragraphs at 6 to maybe 10 sentences. More sentences make really big blocks of hard-to-read text and much less can make the text jumpy and longer then necessary. Do try to avoid complex sentences with lots of punctuation. Keep it simple. Now this can vary some depending on your audience, purpose and context. If it is a literary website then you can probably have longer and more complex sentences and paragraphs. If it is a movie review blog, you’ll want to keep things more concise.
- Tip 3: Use bullets. This is a pretty easy and fun tip. I love bullets. They make organizing and skimming so easy. Bullets allow you to emphasize points, show lists, and they provide a nice visual break in your pages, which also draws eyes to them. Jane Austen used to put letters in her books to provide a visual break in the pages of text—we get to use bullets. Obliviously you should not randomly use bullets. Make sure you use bullets for some type of list—whether it be 7 web writing tips or a grocery list you blogged about.
- Tip 4: Use headings and subheadings. This tip is especially important if you have a long page of text (which you should try to avoid). Headings and subheadings work like bullets—they help organize your text, they emphasize material, and they allow the readers to skim. If a reader is looking for a key piece of information, good headings and subheadings should tell them where to look first. Make sure your headings are visually different from your text—perhaps in a different font, in a different color, in bold, or some combination of these. If you have a short page, just headings should be fine. If you have a longer page, you may want to consider a level of subheadings too. However, you probably should not go any deeper than one level of subheadings. If you can go deeper, break the page up into many different pages. Keep your headings short and descriptive.
- Tip 5: Use numbers. This tip actually goes against tip #1 to some degree. Most print style manuals suggest using words for numbers under 10 and numerals for those 10 and over. Of course, any numbers that start sentences should also be written out as words. However, this is one rule for print you can choose to ignore—at least mostly. Research has shown that numerals jump out on web pages and are easier to read—so many web writing experts suggest using numerals for all numbers including those under 10 within your sentences. You should still use words if numbers start your sentence, however, if you are using numerals for all numbers otherwise, I’d suggest rearranging the sentence so it does not start with a number.
- Tip 6: Write like a newspaper journalist. Many newspaper journalists write in an inverted pyramid style. With this style all the key points and facts are at the beginning and as the story progresses less and less important information and details are included. The idea behind this is that a newpaper editor can just cut out paragraphs of text starting with the bottom of the story if she needs space, because these bottom paragraphs contain the least important content in the article. In web texts you may not need to cut for space, but your readers may not read the whole story and may only skim. So, by placing the most important information at the top, the readers are the most likely to read it. Then, if they want details they can continue reading. Do answer the questions of who, what, when, where, how, and why in the first paragraph if possible. Then use the rest of the text to flesh out the needed details.
- Tip 7: If it is print, let us print it. If you have documents on your website that are designed to be print documents, maybe a report or a brochure, provide the link to the file that the readers can print. Don’t just copy the text onto your website and force readers to read it online—provide them the option to print it. Quite frankly taking print text and moving it online is not very productive anyway; as these tips show, you need to do some rewriting and reformatting to make it a web-friendly text. So, consider saving yourself some time. Put a summary of the print document up and then a link to the print document. I recommend putting the print document up in .pdf or .rtf formats, as these are the most universally accessible.
And there is your web writing 101 introduction. In summary:
- 1. Apply regular writing rules to web writing
- 2. Keep it concise
- 3. Use bullets
- 4. Use headings and subheadings
- 5. Use numbers
- 6. Write like a newspaper journalist
- 7. If it is print, let us print it
The next thing I said I would talk about is the idea behind this podcast. Thanks to my husband, and some bad weather that kept me in Atlanta, I attended part of Podcamp 2007 in Atlanta, and became interested in podcasting. At Podcamp I met Steve Eley, who is the publisher and editor of Escape Pod, a fantastic science fiction short story podcast, and the publisher of PseudoPod, a horror podcast, and now Pod Castle, a fantasy podcast. He offered to come to my classes and talk about podcasting and I invited him the next semester. Podcamp got me thinking about what type of podcast I would do if I was do one. My husband soon started his own professional podcast—Talking Traffic, which I highly recommend for anyone who ever wonders why our roads and transportation system works the way it do—from red lights to bridge design concerns. In preparation for Steve’s visit to my class, I discovered there were very few web design podcasts for the average person. There were some for experts who do web design as their profession, but these were not generally helpful for the everyday person. There were also some in German and several that had podfaded. Thus, I had found my podcast idea—a topic I not only enjoy, but teach and research and a unique audience that is not being clearly reached by other podcasts. So, Screen Space was born and is continuing to grow and develop. I’ve already had some feedback that my podcast has helped one web designer talk her church out of bad web design choices. How is it working for you? Let me know.
You may wonder about the title. I was looking for something catchy and appropriate when I began the blog the podcast grew out of. Issues of space have always been a concern in electronic writing from the days of hypertext to today’s cell pone web browsers, so space fit nicely. Once I had the idea of including space in the name, screen came quickly to mind. Web design, blogs, and new media are very much about screen space. Not only do they literally take up space on our screens, but they are also part of the “space” of the world wide web, and space is a design concern. So, Screen Space became the name.
If you have listened to more than one of these podcasts you may have noticed I end with a short saying “have fun and design well.” This originated in my classes. Often in undergraduate classes I do a “mini lecture” with PowerPoint slides as an outline. I often end the PowerPoint with a cheesy last page—some silly piece of clip art and a silly saying related to the topic. These silly sayings developed into “have fun and design well”—which is positive, fun, and still on topic. It seemed a natural way to close my podcast too. Be thankful you don’t get silly clip art too.
So, that is a bit of the development of Screen Space. Now, for the next step in the podcast development. I would like to start talking about actual websites in this podcast and would love you, my loyal listeners, to submit sites for discussion. I am particularly looking for exceptional sites—either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. I’m going to develop a rating system of some type—what I have been vaguely referring to as the Screen Space Star rating system. Given the “space” in my title, I figured giving out stars was appropriate. But I am not sure if I should give out a certain number of stars, say 1 for an awful website and 5 for a fabulous one, or develop an other system. Perhaps the site can earn a “Screen Space Star” if it is a great site or something negative if it is a bad site. I’m not sure what the negative will be. If you have any brilliant ideas on which system to use or how to work the system, let me know. I welcome insights and will give you credit and recognition if I use it. Although the system is not set, please start sending me those wonderful and awful sites you come across. Send me an email at jbowie@screenspace.org or submit a suggestion to the blog, www.screenpace.org. I’ll setup a special page on the blog just for suggestions.
Before I close, I did want to thank Steve Eley for his work with the sound levels on my last episode. I appreciate the help and the sound quality is much better thanks to him. I do suggest you check out his podcasts; Escape Pod is one of my favorite podcasts and I also enjoy PodCastle. I’ll provide links in the transcript.
Also, you may have wondered a bit about the music I used before and after the interview in episode 4. In case you did not figure this out, that was the beginning of iii, Brian’s Snead’s song, which I closed the podcast with.
If you have questions, comments, or thoughts on what you want me to cover please send me an email at jbowie@screenspace.org or check out the Screen Space blog—www.screenspace.org. Have fun and design well!
Screen Space is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. So, feel to send a copy to that website with the awful text, but don’t change it, do give me and Screen Space credit, and don’t make any money off of it.
Screen Space’s opening music today is “African Dance” by Apa Ya off of Headroom Project and the closing music is “Survival” by Beth Quist off of “Shall We Dance”. Both these selections are available from Magnatune.
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