Writing for the Web: Why is the Advice so Scant?
Be careful when you go online searching for advice about writing for
the Internet. The literature and composition teachers of the
world -- the traditional arbiters of "good" writing -- have
been slow to adapt to the special requirements of electronic text.
Update: Crawford Kilian's Writing for the Web offers an excellent introduction to the subject. Like most books about e-text, however, it presumes that the reader is already familiar with the conventions of printed prose -- something that my students are usually still learning.
Turning the pages of a book is still (and will probably always be) the best way to read a novel; after all, the novel was designed for the book -- which was then a "novel" device. But the Internet has spawned new writing genres (email, instant messages, FAQ pages, annotated lists of links, weblogs, personal home pages) which demand a different writing mode.
Communication tips written by cybergeeks do occasionally talk about clarifying your objectives, satisfying your audience, or helping users navigate smoothly through your site. Many also rightly recognize the primacy of substance over style (although some focus on the ownership of content, rather than its creation an d distribution -- see Bill Gates, "Content is King").
Because designers tend to think visually and the web is still primarily a text medium, designers rarely discuss how to write the content itself; the information superhighway is littered with the corpses of companies that wasted millions of dollars developing cool technology, but failed to attract readers. The web is, after all, mostly words, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
A site called "Net Tips for Writers and Designers" might look promising for someone looking for writing advice; after all, "Writers" comes before "Designers" in the title. However...
- The introduction includes the following statement: "If you're into making your HTML pages look great, everything here is for you." (Wait a minute... what if I want to do more than make it "look great"?)
- The rest of the page offers 12 tips on page layout and only 2 tips on language (one of which is a "rant" against people who say spelling matters: "This is hogwash!")
- How useful is this site to a writer, as opposed to a designer?
One might expect that a site called the "Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide" would have something interesting to say about writing style. (Click on the link above to open the site in a new window.)
- In spring, 1999, the URL above took you to a home page that was nothing but a pretty picture (either a graphic or a slide with a "Deep Thought" on it) and a link that said"Click to continue." By the fall of that year, the pretty picture had been replaced with a table of contents and a pitch to sell you a book.
- The table of contents is just that -- there is no introduction or purpose statement.
- Aha! There's an item labeled "Purpose of the site" under the subheading "Philosophy." If you click on it, you find yourself on a page titled "Purpose of your site" -- this page talks about questions you should ask when you are writing your own website. (This item was mislabeled on the previous page.)
- Back up and try again. Maybe the first item, "Introduction,"
will have something to say about the purpose of this web site.
- On the "Philosophy | Introduction" page, you find
yourself reading a paragraph in which the authors appear to be
more interested in providing their own credentials than they are
in introducing this web site:
This style manual developed as an outgrowth of our own World Wide Web (Web) development projects. It reflects our attempts to apply some of the lessons we've learned in twelve years of multimedia software design, graphic interface design, and book design to the new medium of Web pages and site design.
- Way down at the bottom of the page, you will find the following
warning:
There is little here of benefit to users of text-based Web browsers, as the primary focus of this manual is on graphic page design.
- On the "Philosophy | Introduction" page, you find
yourself reading a paragraph in which the authors appear to be
more interested in providing their own credentials than they are
in introducing this web site:
- Silly you! You thought a web style guide might have something to say about writing style!
- In addition, this site is so slow, and the design is so bad, that I have never had the patience to find out just exactly what it's supposed to be for, or what the acronym "C/AIM" means.
Although there are lots of sites like these, which promise more than they deliver, there are also a few sites that do talk about online writing. Jakob Nielsen, a computer guru who stumbled across the principles of good online writing almost by trial and error, has written several extremely informative articles about how writing can affect the usefulness of a web site. Because Nielsen's goal is to help companies make money from impatient consumers, he has no motivation to examine creative uses of hypertext to build suspense, tell a story, create an emotional effect, or do anything other than deliver information.
On the other hand, literary theorists like George Landow and Stuart Moulthrop and developers such as Mark Bernstein developed their thoughts about hypertext long before the World Wide Web made the average person into a hypertext user. As a result, canonical hypertext theory mostly examines the ways in which hypertext meets the needs of an ideal reader who wishes to linger, ponder, explore, and discover.
- Dave Winer knows why your web site sucks... and he admits, his site sucks, too. "I look at the wrong words on my screen and decide that it's too much trouble to get it right." Web writing will continue to suffer as long as software companies write for computer geeks instead of real people.
- Engineers Stole the Personal Computer "by building cumbersome, illogical development environments that no one other than an engineer could possibly understand." Bruce Tognazzini.
- George Landow's Literary Hypertext Chronology
- The Heist
(A hypertext mystery)
- Sample page: three kinds of links here; one is a dead end, one continues the scene, and one invites you to go on.
- Interview with Walter Sorrel (author of "The Heist")
- Wired: Online writing gets sloppier, blunter
- Birkerts vs. Murray: Digital Storytelling: Is it Art?
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