A headline in yesterday’s paper read: Rafters take a wild ride on Merrimack.
An article about building materials for a new post-and-beam home washed downstream? A story about an old barn crumbling and floating away in the latest assault from Mother Nature?
Nope. In this case, “rafters,” refers to a couple of young women who launched a toy raft into the Merrimack River, intending to float a few hundred feet to a sandbar. Instead, they got caught in a strong current and “rafted” downstream for more than three hours before washing ashore.
The headline writer could have avoided the ambiguity by writing: Toy raft takes two on a wild ride.
Introduces and develops a topic of broad public interest or concern, tied to a timely event or a local resource. Alternatively, it could touch on something whimsical or humorous. Keeping our homepage fresh with articles related to important or emerging issues demonstrates that UNH Cooperative Extension stays informed about and responsive to these issues.
Includes some local angle or aspect of specific interest to New Hampshire people. People give birth, raise children, attend school or not, get married or divorced, seed a lawn, resolve disputes with their neighbors, become victims of violence, take care of an aging parent, commit a crime, plant a vegetable garden, hire a pesticide applicator, sell timber, suffer discrimination, establish credit, buy a house or a horse, experience a septic system failure, find or lose a job, get diagnosed with a chronic illness, and die in a particular place.
The laws and regulations, physical environment, climate, cultural ambience, demographics, and the specific resources available (or not available) in that place typically play a substantial role in people’s ability to understand a situation, meet their needs, and respond individually or collectively to challenges.
Adding concrete aspects of place to an article connects writer and readers deeply and immediately, creates a direct emotional bond of shared experience and helps build a sense of community. We can use aspects of place to promote specific CE programs, promote the interests of our local partners, demonstrate our ability to integrate resources, give voice to our stakeholders, and allow site visitors to connect visually and locally to the topic (e.g., photo galleries).
Offers something of value readers won’t find anywhere else. Leading Internet economists suggest the Net will gradually bring an end to our current concept of intellectual property (proprietary content), in favor of intellectual value. UNHCE writers can create intellectual value by offering local perspectives on global, national and regional issues; by giving voice to (or inviting) unique local solutions to common problems, by presenting a wide range of perspectives not available in mainstream information sources, by promoting local events, and by hosting online discussions of many sorts. We don’t have to be the experts. We can bring outside experts to our Web site or set the stage for our stakeholders to develop and share their own expertise there.
Demonstrates awareness of the many dimensions of the issue at hand. Most every collection of empirical facts has moral, social, cultural, economic, political, gender, age, linguistic, and other dimensions embedded within it. Most issues also have a complex inside as well as an outside. The visible, empirical aspects of a topic (what we might call its outside) include raw data, measurements, and physical resources (things). Its invisible inside includes such aspects as perceptions, memories, emotions, level of awareness, cultural aspects, values and sense of self that both writer and reader bring to the topic.
Writers enhance their credibility and demonstrate expertise when their writing shows an understanding of the many dimensions and layers of the topic at hand, through word choice, writing style, embedded links, lists of links, sidebars, direct quotations, questions for readers, and other rhetorical techniques.
Offers opportunities for readers to make choices about what they need and want to know about the topic. Many professionals continue operating from the “broadcast” mode that positions the writer as the expert who determines what learners need to know, and readers as the relatively passive learner/novice.
The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to let readers themselves make their own travel plans. As noted in yesterday's post, links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.
Links provide the glue that shapes, builds and defines the Web. Try writing two or three lead paragraphs, then use the rest of your time and your expertise to develop links that connect to related pages on our own site and links that point away from it.
Note: When you link, link deeply, not to a site’s homepage, but to the internal page or pages of a site that delivers the information you think readers might find interesting.
Don’t hesitate to change the name of a page when you direct readers to it via a link. When the page title alone doesn’t indicate specifically what visitors will find if they travel there, always provide annotation , a brief description or abstract that readers can use when deciding whether to click and go there or pass it by.
Part of my job involves recruiting material for our homepage to keep it fresh and timely, working with staff to develop Web-ready articles and appropriate graphic elements, and getting the “products” to Faye for posting. Paul (my supervisor) and Holly (my ally and sounding board) collaborate on this venture.
So, what makes a good homepage feature?
First and foremost, it should exemplify clean, easy-to-understand prose that people find interesting to read, that delivers on the promise of its title and opening lines, and that shows awareness of and respect for readers’ needs.
The homepage itself doesn’t have a specific, carefully targeted audience. Its audience includes anyone who comes to the page. Ideally, writers should use links to direct various reader groups to related materials that might interest them.
Because Internet users experience Web pages as places they go to, travel around in, and leave, writers should work to create a special ambiance that connects to New Hampshire people and piques the interest of anyone who drops in for a visit. Even if they just cruise in and out without reading anything all the way through, or don’t have an interest in the specific topics, site visitors should leave thinking, “Hey, I want to come back here soon.”
Writing for the Web allows you to write a little and point to a lot. The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to vast realms of territory, letting readers themselves make their own travel plans.
Links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide nuanced or highly technical detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.
Research shows that professionals/experts enhance their credibility on the Web as much by what they point to as by what they themselves write.
The Web uniquely empowers all users to respond, publish, comment, review, critique, and add their own ideas, as well as to build both ad hoc and enduring communities of discourse, planning, research and action. This capability approaches the ideal of engagement the Kellogg Foundation has suggested as the key to survival of the land-grant universities and the cooperative extension system associated with them: two-way, even multi-party communication to which each party brings knowledge, skill and experience and in which each individual participates as both learner and teacher.
Done well, our homepage can serve our visitors’ needs for timely information, while simultaneously serving other purposes. Some of these include:
Tomorrow I’ll introduce some specific elements of the ideal homepage feature.
Today’s microcontent mischief:
The ambiguity in this online article’s headline arises from the dual meanings of the capitalized word “Bill.” Does the headline writer mean a man named Bill, or the draft of a proposed law?
As for the Monitor headline, for Web display or reference, you might rewrite it to read something like this: Floods bring out Good Samaritans.
One Extension colleague told me recently he’d just returned from giving a “static” presentation because the group that invited him said they’d found the previous presenter on the topic “too interactive.”
I don’t know the particulars of that situation—the group may have had perfectly good reasons for preferring a “static” style. But my friend’s comment came to mind as I read an interesting online essay by Peter Merholz titled, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control:
When Google launched, one reason it shocked the Web community was its focus on getting you to where you actually wanted to go. How could there be a successful business model in actively sending people away from your site?
Seven years and a $75 billion market capitalization later, that question has obviously been answered. The other search engines attempted to control your behavior. Google recognized that users maintain control, and to win they had to become users’ preferred choice.
The Web, whose sum and substance derives from its human interactions (aka “links”), offers an especially hard lesson for teachers and other professionals who want to manage what and how people learn online. The Web not only empowers all its users to develop “content,” it blurs the lines between teachers and students, writers and readers, experts and laypeople, producers and consumers.
Although Merholz addresses his remarks primarily to businesses, they surely apply to educational enterprises as well:
Again and again, the history of the Web shows us the value of relinquishing control. Amazon’s customer comments were originally thought foolish by those who believed negative reviews would hurt sales. Instead, they increased trust, which drove more transactions. eBay’s open marketplace eschews centralized control of buyers and sellers, instead favoring a distributed management system where individuals rate one another. Not coincidentally, Google, Amazon, and eBay have all made available their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that others can leverage their information in unforeseen and innovative ways.Many designers [and writers] find it remarkably difficult to relinquish control….They get so caught up in controlling the superficial form of the product that they neglect to appreciate the context of the experience.
The Web’s lesson is that we have to let go, to exert as little control as necessary. What are the fewest necessary rules that we can provide to shape the experience? Where do people, tools, and content come together? How do we let go in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to our [mission]?
Relinquishing control is a scary prospect because it diminishes certainty. With control comes predictable outcomes that you can bank on. But in this increasingly complex, messy, and option-filled world, we must acknowledge that our customers hold the reins. Attempts to control their experience will lead to abandonment for the less onerous alternative. What we can do is provide the best tools and content that they can fit into their lives, and their ways.
F for fast. That's how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school. Jakob Nielsen, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox features a summary of his study tracking Web users’ eye movements to learn more about how people read online.
Nielsen, the grandfather of Web usability research, tracked the eye movements of 232 users interacting with thousands of Web pages. The study revealed that people typically read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. Nielsen lists three sequential components to the F-shaped reading pattern:
F for fast. That's how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school. Jakob Nielsen, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox features a summary of his study tracking Web users’ eye movements to learn more about how people read online.
Nielsen, the grandfather of Web usability research, tracked the eye movements of 232 users interacting with thousands of Web pages. The study revealed that people typically read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. Nielsen lists three sequential components to the F-shaped reading pattern:
“My first thought is that reporters and editors have a job to do and they shouldn't worry about what Google's or Yahoo's software thinks of their work,” said Michael Schudson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who is a visiting faculty member at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
“But my second thought is that newspaper headlines and the presentation of stories in print are in a sense marketing devices to bring readers to your story,” Mr. Schudson added. “Why not use a new marketing device appropriate to the age of the Internet and the search engine?” Steve Lohr, This Boring Headline is Written for Google
Why not indeed?
The headlines of news articles and titles of magazine articles, information bulletins, short stories, etc., have always served as marketing devices—“first words” that alert readers to what the piece to follow has to offer, and that lure them to read on.
But a piece in Sunday’s New York Times titled, This Boring Headline is Written for Google, describes some of the teeth-gnashing going on as newspapers move into universe of online publishing, where they discover they must develop headlines and lead paragraphs not merely for readers and steely-eyed copyeditors, but (gasp!) for search engines as well.
In the lingo of the day, the new medium requires “search engine optimization,” which writer Steve Lohr reminds us, has become a $1.25 billion business.
“[W]hen you’re also writing for search engines, … you tend to write headlines that are more straightforward,” said Lou Ferrara, online editor of The Associated Press. “My worry is that some creativity is lost.”
Whether search engines will influence journalism below the headline is uncertain. The natural-language processing algorithms, search experts say, scan the title, headline and at least the first hundred words or so of news articles.
Journalists, they say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject—and then include them in the first few sentences. “That's not something they teach in journalism schools,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. “But in the future, they should.”
Unlike hard-copy media such as books magazines, and newspapers, which offer readers plenty of visual context—clear page and article boundaries, sidebars, photographs and pull quotes, for example—headlines, titles and other online microcontent often stand alone.
Choosing headlines and titles that attract search engines and that make sense to online searchers means choosing words and phrases that actually tell online searchers/readers what the document covers. Headlines for the Web can’t use puns, metaphors, allusions, slang, idioms and other figurative language that doesn’t make sense out of context.
In some respects, writing titles (and text) for the Web resembles working in the terse poetic format known as haiku. In its strictest form, haiku doesn’t allow figurative language, but merely reports direct experience. Yet I’ve never heard a critic complain that haiku lacks creativity, nuance, resonance, or substance.
So a picture is worth 1000 words?
On the Web, words on a screen are themselves viewed as a picture. It's a variable, morphing, feral sort of picture, however.
For the writer, it's a case of smartening up, not dumbing down.It's only words from the Web site Quality Web Content: Words that Work
I recently came across Quality Web Content: Words that Work, a nice compendium (from New Zealand) of information for Web writers (aka “content producers”). Simple, well-designed, fun to read. Not too geeky.
A few selections from a long list of articles:
Standards for online content authors
Stop creating ROT (redundant, outdated and trivial content)
It's only words
How to write a summary, and why
Write powerful headlines for web pages
Christ the King Lives Up to National Reputation blared a headline from the March 25 New York Times sports section's online version.
How's that for getting people's atention? If you clicked on the link and opened the story, you'd have read:
GLENS FALLS, N.Y., March 25 — With four seconds left in the state Class AA title game, both teams seemed to move in slow motion as Tina Charles dribbled toward the hoop.
Her teammates from Christ the King High School in Queens were shocked, their mouths agape. Her opponents from Murry Bergtraum in Manhattan were dispirited, their heads hung low.
To end the game, the 6-foot-4 Charles, perhaps the nation's top player, put the ball into the hoop, coming just an inch or two from dunking. Before her feet returned to the ground, the crowd resounded with cheers for Christ the King.
Maybe the paper's headline writer just couldn't restrain herself. [Thanks to Steve Judd for this one.]
Caught this headline yesterday from a long list of links to recent news about H5 N1 bird flu: Israel eradicates all bird flu in poultry-minister.
Confusion arises from the writer's use of the hyphen, which makes the word “poultry” seem to modify “minister,” suggesting that the nation has cured its agriculture minister, Zeev Boim, of avian flu.
However, the article refers to Boim’s announcement that the recent cull of 1.2 million chickens and turkeys at seven farms (costing million shekels, or $5.1 million, in reimbursements to farmers) had eradicated the deadly influenza from the nation’s domestic bird population. [Not all that reassuring, really, since Boim also announced the virus could return any day, due to infections currently raging in neighboring Gaza, Egypt, and Jordan. News of the day also carried reports of farmers in Gaza refusing to cull their flocks.]
The headline writers could have cured the confusion by replacing the hyphen with a colon: Israel eradicates all bird flu in poultry: minister, or by reordering the words: Minister: Israel eradicates all bird flu in poultry.
Most of us participate in email listservs, both the established, ongoing type that deal with a certain topic of professional or personal interest and the ad hoc ones that arise when several people begin writing a training manual, planning a workshop series, etc.
Most of us have also had the experience of email messages with the same subject line (e.g., Will the 17th work?) bouncing back and forth on a listserv for days, even weeks.
Change the subject line each time you respond, especially if you start discoursing on an entirely new topic. This will help the people on your list understand that the topic has shifted, however subtly. It will help distinguish your messages from everyone else’s, and you’ll help set a standard for email etiquette. It may also boost your credibility within the group, as someone who pays attention to people’s need to extract meaning from written messages.
I get a lot of email I discard almost immediately, like the one week I received a few days ago with the subject line: “Don’t get spooked, Oct. 31 deadline….”
Classifying it as one of those home mortgage advertisements, I almost trashed it with the day's junk mail. For some reason I clicked on it and found it contained information from a national Extension colleague.
Most office professionals receive dozens, if not hundreds, of email messages each day. If you want to make sure people read your email, learn to write a good subject line. “Hello all,” “Important message for you,” and “Have you ever wondered?” don’t work because they don’t give a harried reader a reason to open and read them.
As someone who's written my share of vague and vacuous subject lines, I've resolved to change my ways. I'll forget about sounding entertaining or literary. I'll make my subject lines as explicit and as specific as possible.
Instead of “Important vote today,” I'll write “Legislature to vote on wildlife bill today.” Rather than “Notice: upcoming forum,” I'll write “Medicare Part D forum Tuesday.”
Ever think about starting a blog? Looking for a few rules of thumb for evaluating the blogs you follow, or for helping your clientele or your kids evaluate a blog?
Web usability expert Jakob Neilsen’s recent Alertbox post outlines the top ten design mistakes bloggers make. I notice I’ve violated some [sigh].
Please read #3 and #4 carefully. Then look at #9. You might not think it applies to you. But consider the many ways Web pages and paragraphs get linked, saved, cached, cut, pasted and emailed. Then substitute words such as “clientele,” “partner agencies,” and “colleagues” for “future boss.”
Tip: Scroll to the bottom of the page for a link that lets you subscribe to Nielsen's Alertboxes. They come infrequently, and you'll nearly always find them interesting, useful, and to the point.
My local paper had a caption yesterday under a photo of the chef at a new restaurant, presenting “a grilled beef tenderloin wrapped in apple smoked bacon dish from the restaurant.”
Eh?
I flashed on the appearance of that “beef tenderloin wrapped in apple smoked bacon dish.” The photo revealed that the dish (platter) itself didn’t wrap around the grilled tenderloin, so I suspected the apple smoking process applied to the bacon, not the dish.
This caption needs a rewrite to deliver the caption-writer’s original meaning. One possibility: “Restaurant chef Robert Steele presents a grilled beef tenderloin wrapped in apple-smoked bacon.”
Writers need to pay special attention to captions, headlines, email subject lines and other brief informational summaries, especially in online documents, where they become “microcontent.”
Microcontent can provide essential contextual or navigational cues for readers, but only when constructed carefully. Microcontent like the caption above raises distracting questions in readers’ minds that slow the reading and may cause confusion.
We fled our newspaper building in New Orleans on Tuesday morning, an eight-hour trek over a bridge and through country roads along the bayou until eventually landing safe in Baton Rouge. We've taken over the Louisiana State University journalism department and everyone is working, publishing online, despite having lost homes, possessions, pets and possibly some friends left behind.Several reporters returned to New Orleans this morning and are in boats and in one case, a kayak, covering the disaster. I'm part of the crew in Baton Rouge, where we are interviewing some of the thousands of evacuees who are here. Gwen Filosa, former Concord Monitor reporter, who now works for the Times Picyaune of New Orleans
If you’ve never considered the power of the Internet to respond to critical and emerging issues in ways unimaingeable only a decade ago, begin by reading this BBC article, which gives a good summary of the combined power of citizens and professional journalist-bloggers to bring on-the-scene news, photographs, pleas and responses for help, and hard information of many types.
Citizen bloggers throughout the storm-ravaged area continue providing first-person accounts and real-time photos, joining hard-news outlets and public emergency officials in collecting, organizing and integrating human communications despite a near-total breakdown of normal channels.
Most newspapers and electronic media outlets now offer online versions, and many have established well-read online blogs. Many encourage participation in local news collection by their own readers and viewers, building on the concept of citizen journalism .
The venerable New Orleans Times-Picayune has blogged all of its news content for the past three days from an outpost in Baton Rouge, after the storm flooded their downtown New Orleans offices.
CNN online has a front-page invitation: CITIZEN JOURNALIST: Has Katrina affected you? E-mail us your story, photos and video
But online visitors can read tens of thousands of up-to-the minute posts on blogsites not directly connected to any big news medium.
In Hurrycane’s Wunderblog, report from a devastated area readers experience a young woman's loss of innocence in her recollections of the storm.
Here, Lucy Keenan and Andrew Bruch, a young married couple living in DC, ask for donations for their planned weekend drive to two small Mississippi communities this weekend.
Where to Help Instapuindit has organized a list of relief agencies.
Staci Karmer’s blog, Trust But Verify Seeks strategies within the “blogosphere” to improve the collection and flow of information
Looking at these listings from craigslist.org makes me weep:
Offers of housing for Katrina victims
Offers of volunteer help of many kinds
Lists of lost and found people
And behold this extraordinary collection of authentic news and commentary in
Community news and views Warning! Strong opinions
Waking Up Writing welcomes contributions (new posts, not simply comments) from Cooperative Extension staff and volunteers who write for UNHCE.
If you want to post—once, occasionally, or often—just send me an email and I'll send back instructions on how to proceed.
The ground rules for guest bloggers:
A recent study by the Carnegie Corporation, titled Abandoning the News found that only 19 percent of 18 to 34 year-olds read a daily newspaper and 12 percent never read newspapers at all. The study also found:
“What’s the future of the news business?” asks Merrill Brown, introducing his report on the project.
There's a dramatic revolution taking place in the news business today and it isn't about TV anchor changes, scandals at storied newspapers or embedded reporters.The future course of the news, including the basic assumptions about how we consume news and information and make decisions in a democratic society are being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.
In short, the future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news.
Through Internet portal sites, handheld devices, blogs and instant messaging, we are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic function of the news business and raise fundamental questions about the future of the news field. Meanwhile, new forms of newsgathering and distribution, grassroots or citizen journalism and blogging sites are changing the very nature of who produces news….
This audience, the future news consumers and leaders of a complex, modern society, are abandoning the news as we've known it, and it's increasingly clear that a great number of them will never return to daily newspapers and the national broadcast news programs.
I urge you all to read Brown’s report in full. As you read, plug in the words “teaching and learning" for “news” to get (1) a deeper understanding of the cultures and communications models increasingly preferred by young audiences, as well as (2) a taste of the challenges of preparing them—and ourselves—to become sophisticated and critical interpreters of online messages.
Out of context, “blooper” newspaper headlines become all the more hilarious:
Farmer bill dies in house
Stiff opposition expected to casketless funeral plan
Enraged cow injures farmer with ax
Queen Mary to have bottom scraped
This doozey appeared in the Concord Monitor a couple of weeks ago: Mom: Man gave finger as payment.
Writers especially need to sweat the small stuff online. Well-crafted headlines, titles, subtitles, captions, email subject lines—“microcontent” in online lingo—can serve as brief abstracts that help narrow and focus a reader’s attention and encourage someone to open an email or stay interested in your page.
Microcontent takes on a magnified importance on the Web, so writers need to take special care in crafting it:
To write effective microcontent, follow these rules of thumb:
Think of each bit of microcontent as a meaningful abstract of the more detailed information to follow.Keep it word-sparse and meaning-dense.
Make it strong and meaningful enough to stand alone.
Lead with the strongest, most meaningful words. For example, write Water Quality Monitoring: Citizens & Experts Join Forces, instead of Lay Lakes Monitoring Program: Citizens and Experts Join Forces. Lay Lakes won’t mean much to most readers when it turns up on a search engine hit list.
Rewrite the titles of links to external resources so your readers will know what they’ll get if they go there. Say you want to link to an online paper the original author has titled Come again?. Because the page helps writers revise their rough drafts, you could retitle your link Revising your rough drafts.
Avoid colloquial expressions, slang, professional jargon, metaphors and other figurative speech, and puns or “cute” words.
Research by Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen and others has shown:
People can comfortably read only half as many words on a computer screen as they can from a printed text page.Online, people scan; they don’t read word for word.
Web users often keep several browser windows open, switching back and forth among them as they look for information.
Only highly motivated readers will scroll in search of essential information.
People who come online looking for information don’t tolerate jargon, wordplay or hype.
Effective writing for the Web entails making lean text even leaner and “designing” text for easy scanning. Some strategies:
Lead with an abstract. Draft a three- or four-line abstract summarizing the information you will deliver. Some Web writers highlight the background of their abstracts to attract reader attention.
Limit the scope of your topic. Announce the scope and limits of your document by the words you use in the title and brief introductory abstract. Add links, rather than text, to expand the document’s scope.
Introduce only one idea per paragraph. If your complex topic demands great detail, present the essential matter and link to a more detailed explanation you or another online writer has prepared.
Chunk your text.
“Chunking” refers to separating long text blocks into segments for ease of scanning and reading online. Some strategies for chunking:
Use plenty of headings and subheadings/titles and subtitles. Boldface headers create clear, visual separations between text blocks that facilitate scanning. Treat titles and subtitles like mini-abstracts to deliver information that summarizes what comes next. Make sure your titles and subtitles lead with strong, meaning-dense words.Create white space. Think of white space—the emptiness between words, sentences, and paragraphs—as your primary design tool. Use short words and simple sentences. Keep most paragraphs to five lines or fewer.
Use bulleted and numbered lists where appropriate. Bulleted lists visually separate ideas, but suggest a close relationship among the items in the list. Web usability experts suggest using no more than two levels of "information hierarchy"—more increases the cognitive load for readers. Use numbered lists only to illustrate sequences, such as how-to instructions or timelines.Highlight keywords and phrases in bold. In addition to frequent subheadings and bulleted lists, bolded words and phrases help scanning readers discern the meat of your document and decide whether it bears closer reading to pick up the details. Warning: Don’t underline for emphasis. Online readers associate underlining with active links. Also, use italics sparingly. Usability studies show that readers find italicized text difficult to read online.
Use links to pages that provide background, offer more detailed information, or introduce related topics. Links to internal or external pages can direct beginners or more sophisticated readers to pages that explain or amplify your main points.
Use visuals to provide details. Images often deliver what words cannot. Use charts, graphs, photographs, cartoons and other visual elements to provide information and impact that support and extend your text. Select graphics that deliver meaning; don’t clutter the screen with visuals that offer only decorative value.
Take a look at the Web-writing guidelines produced by the MIT libraries. I consider it one of the best examples of online writing style and page display.
Think of text as graphic elements on the page. Writers typically don’t have much say in the design and format of the publications in which their work appears, but they do control the shapes and patterns created by their flow of their words.
A reader's eye scans the page and receives many messages before the words begin to register their intended (or unintended) meanings. A dense block of long words, long sentences and long paragraphs intimidates the eye and paralyzes the mind.
White space creates a restful, inviting visual environment. It helps determine the pace and rhythm of your work. Create white space mindfully as you revise and edit.
Offer generous page margins. Keep most of your words, sentences and paragraphs short. Rather than indenting paragraphs in your document, keep your text flush left and leave vertical extra space between your paragraphs. (Exceptions: adacemic or journal style guides that specify indented paragraphs.)
Two cautions:
Don’t leave too much white space. Readers may interpret too much emptiness as a sign you don’t have much to say.Vary the lengths of words, sentences and paragraphs to avoid a choppy, childish style most readers find annoying.
No matter how compelling the plea, how hilarious the jokes, or how time-sensitive an email chain letter seems, resist the urge to pass it along.
Some chain mail delivers malicious code that can wreak havoc with your computer and infect the computers of everyone on your mailing list.
Even clean email may:
Since most chain mail you receive doesn’t bear much, if any, relationship to your work, passing it along (with your name and signature intact) might come back to bite you if an obnoxious message ends up in the wrong inbox.
If you receive chain mail from a colleague, hit the Reply button and ask him or her not to send chain mail, citing the above reasons.
Learn more about chain email and online hoaxes.