160 Improve your Communication Skills
ones, and abstract nouns into concrete ones.
Remove
unnecessary words and exterminate clichés. Punctuate inflated
language and connect your sentences together carefully.
Writing for the web
Writing for the web is in many ways like writing for any other
medium.
A number of key features, however, make reading on
screen a different experience from reading on paper.
Understanding those features will help you produce more usable
text for websites and web-based documents.
Key qualities of web text
Research suggests that web users feel
happiest when web text is
concise, scannable and objective. ‘Concise’ means that the text
says what it needs to say and no more. ‘Scannable’ means that big
ideas
are prominent; that paragraphs are not too long; and that
key words are easy to pick out. ‘Objective’
means that the writer
tends to remove their own feelings from the text. Readers want
information when they are using the web;
opinions and feelings
tend to get in the way.
Additionally, readers have voted for:
• clear navigation aids;
• evidence of the writer’s credibility; and
• an informal style.
Thinking about your readers
The key to effective web-writing is to
think of your reader as a
visitor, rather than a long-term associate. Reading a book or a
report requires a level of commitment from your reader that web
reading simply doesn’t demand.
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