Keep your readers informed

The brevity issue leads into another important issue in writing for the Web - credibility. One of the reasons people tend to skim instead of reading pages carefully is that a lot of the pages out there aren't worth reading carefully, or at all. Finding information on the Web is a process of gathering lots of material, then picking the few worthwhile resources out of the flotsam and jetsam of dead links, long-abandoned pages, amateurish attempts and good old-fashioned bad writing. "Don't believe everything you read" has always been valuable advice, and its value took off like an IPO the day they invented the Web.

The corollary to "Don't believe everything you read" is "Consider the source." The wise Web reader wants to know three things before she invests her time in reading an article:

1. Who wrote it?
2. When did they write it?
3. Who paid for it to be written?

Some of the reasons for keeping these qualifications in mind are obvious. If you're looking for information about a product you're thinking of buying, you need to know whether you're reading a product review in an independent magazine, or a marketing blurb written by the company. If you're reading up on a legal matter, you need to know whether you're reading something written by an experienced lawyer or by some crank with a political ax to grind. If you want to find the tour dates for your favorite band, you need to know if you're looking at this year's schedule or last year's.

Print magazines and books come bound together in one piece, with a title and a date printed somewhere (one hopes), so the answers to the three questions above are usually obvious. People don't usually tear out a page of a book and try to pass it off as a page from a different book. On the Web, however, it's very common for pages to be seen out of context. Consider how search engines work. When you search for a particular phrase, you're going to find pages containing that phrase from various different sites, randomly jumbled together, in no relation to the way the site publishers intended for the material to be organized. You're as likely to be led to a page several levels down in a particular site's hierarchy as you are to be led to the site's home page.

Now, if the Web site publisher is on the ball, this isn't much of a problem, because every page has some sort of logo that identifies it as part of a particular site, and some sort of navigational links to help you find the other sections of the site. The best content sites also include a date and the author's name, and often the author's email address. But guess what! Web site publishers aren't always quite as conscientious as we would like, and as a writer you may have little control over how your writing is presented.

I'm not implying that you need to begin every paragraph with a disclaimer and your home address - just that you need to be aware that your articles, or even sections of your articles, will be seen out of context as often as not. Keep your viewpoint consistent throughout an article, and try to avoid using pronouns whose reference would be unclear out of context. A writer must use his own judgment as to what is an appropriate balance between maximum clarity and excessive redundancy, but when writing for the Web, it's usually best to err on the side of clarity. If a reader stumbled across a couple of paragraphs of your latest article, separated from the rest, would they have any idea what you are writing about?

Readers want to know "who is speaking," and how much salt to apply to your words before consumption. It's a good policy to refer to personal experiences and verifiable facts whenever appropriate. Which of the following two sentences is better?

"Writing for the Web demands a much more concise style than writing for print."

Or

"Four years as the editor of an online magazine ( The Web Developer's Journal) has convinced me that writing for the Web demands a much more concise style than writing for print."

Well, the second one is longer, but it tells you who is speaking, and why you might consider believing what I have to say.

In general, people are more interested in reading about someone's real-life experiences than in reading something that a staff writer paraphrased from somebody else's experiences. If you've got hard facts to back up what you say, trot them out proudly.

One important clue to who is speaking is simply the style of writing used. Savvy readers know the difference between marketing hype and objective analysis, just as they can tell a news article from an editorial in a newspaper. If you're trying to write objectively, use an objective style and avoid exaggeration and vague claims. Consider the difference between these two sentences:

"WebFridge is one of the most revolutionary new products in years, and can save you an incredible amount of time and money."

WebFridge is a new product that keeps track of the items in a refrigerator, with the goal of saving time on visits to the grocery store.

The first sentence is classic marketing hype. It tells you that WebFridge is great, but doesn't say anything about what it actually does, or how it saves time and money. The second sentence contains facts - it tells you what the product does, and how it is supposed to save time, without conceding that it actually succeeds in doing so.

When writing objectively, avoid superlatives and vague claims, and state nothing as a fact without presenting evidence. Even if you've been hired to write marketing hype, you should seriously consider keeping the temperature down. Overblown hype tends to fall on deaf ears for a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious one is that anyone who gushes praise about anything is immediately distrusted. If you must rave about something, at least present solid reasons for your delight, as in the following example:

"As Head Refrigerator Editor of the Smart Appliance Journal, I've tested a lot of Web-enabled refrigerators, including models from CleverCooler and FrugalFreezer, and there's no doubt in my mind that WebFridge has the other products beat by a mile. It gets colder, has a faster modem, and sells for hundreds less than any comparable models. This is one fancy fridge!"

There's another reason to avoid marketing hype - it's harder to read than simple prose. As people skim through a Web page, they mentally discard all the "greatest thing since..." and "state-of-the-art..." and "industry leader..." crapola, and extract whatever actual facts are buried in the verbiage. It's much more effort to read marketing bumf than to read concise, fact-filled prose, and once a surfer's attention starts to wander...Click! They're gone!

Cut it down and open it up
Writing for the Web
Nicer prose, or more page views?