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116 pages

English

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Description

This book will help you write prose that's as good as your code. It includes a convenient, easy-to-use Webwriter's style guide to step you through the rules governing abbreviations, biased terms, capitalization, and compound words. Exercises will help you practice your new Webwriting techniques, and critiques of real Websites will give you practical advice.
PREFACE xv
INTRODUCTION xxi
1 HISTORY, HYPERTEXT, AND INTERACTIVE
COMMUNICATION 1
1. Plain Text versus Hypertext 3
2. The Interactive Communication Model 5
3. Computers Make Us Impatient 6
4. Computers Give Us Jolts 7
5. Computer-Screen Text Is Hard to Read 7
5.1 Computer-screen text is hard to proofread 8
6. Websites Attract Different Kinds of Visitors 8
7. Webtext Is Hypertext 9
v
CONTENTS
2 STRUCTURING YOUR WEBSITE 11
1. Chunking: Hit and Run Information Retrieval 12
2. Scrolling: Information Retrieval by Downloading 14
3. The Three Principles of Webtext 16
3.1 Orientation: Where am I and how do I get
around this site? 17
3.2 Information: The reason for the site’s existence 19
3.3 Action: What people should do once they’re
informed 20
3 ORGANIZING WEBSITE CONTENT 23
1. Orientation: Navigation Cues Provide a Site
Overview 23
1.1 Understand how visitors scan web pages 24
1.2 Treat every page like a home page 26
1.3 Signal transitions with navigation buttons 27
2. Orientation: Headlines 28
2.1 Use subheads 29
2.2 Grab readers’ interest: Hooks, links, and blurbs 30
3. Information: Analyze Your Audience — and Yourself! 34
3.1 What’s your exformation? 35
3.2 Create a “client brief ” 39
3.3 Organize consciously 40
3.4 Writing webtext from scratch 42
3.5 Style and display 44
3.6 Format for printing 45
3.7 Use bulleted lists 46
4. Action: Communication Runs Both Ways 48
4.1 Response cues 49
4 WRITING GOOD WEBTEXT 53
1. Activate the Passive 54
vi Writing for the Web
1.1 Don’t confuse passive voice with past tense 55
2. Choose Concrete Anglo-Saxon Words 56
3. Use Simple Sentences 57
4. Avoid Clichés 58
5. Choose Strong Verbs over Weak Ones 61
6. Be Aware of Dialect Variations 61
7. Be Precise 62
7.1 Diction: Choose your words carefully 63
8. Don’t Use Extended Metaphors 70
9. Use Clear Antecedents 71
10. Grammar and Usage: Common Errors 71
10.1 Sentence fragments 71
10.2 Subject-verb disagreements 72
10.3 Incorrect pronouns 73
10.4 Misuse of adjective for adverb 74
5 EDITING WEBTEXT 77
1. Don’t Trust Your Spell Checker 77
2. Check Your Reading Level 78
3. Cut Verbiage 79
4. Critique Your Own Text 79
5. Print Out to Proofread 81
6. Don’t Respect the Text! 82
7. Edit for International Readers 84
8. A Webwriter’s Style Guide 85
8.1 Abbreviations 88
8.2 Business abbreviations 89
8.3 Business symbols 93
8.4 Email abbreviations 94
8.5 Greek and Latin 95
8.6 Scholarly/general abbreviations 96
Contents vii
8.7 Web abbreviations 99
8.8 Punctuating abbreviations 100
8.9 Pluralizing abbreviations 101
8.10 Abbreviating dates 101
8.11 Biased terms 102
8.12 Capitalization 107
9. Online Advice about Online Writing Style 114
6 CORPORATE WEBWRITING 115
1. Challenges for Corporate Webwriters 116
2. Define Your Audience 118
3. Corporate Webwriting Needs the “You” Attitude 119
4. Too Many Webwriters Can Spoil the Site 121
5. Components of Corporate Websites 123
5.1 Mission statements 123
5.2 Policies 124
5.3 Products 125
5.4 Services 125
5.5 Departments 125
5.6 News 126
5.7 Archives 126
5.8 “Good news surprises” 127
5.9 Action items 127
7 WRITING FOR BLOGS 129
1. Personal Blogs 130
2. Job Blogs 131
3. Specialist Blogs 134
4. News Blogs 135
5. Advocacy Blogs 136
6. Developing the Right Style for Your Blog 138
6.1 Orientation: What your blog is about 139
viii Writing for the Web
6.2 Information: What you want to tell your readers 140
6.3 Action: What you want your readers to do 141
7. Online Résumés 143
7.1 Make a good first impression 143
7.2 Surprise: Redefine yourself as different 145
7.3 Create a portfolio on your site 147
7.4 Provide useful services 149
7.5 Make response easy 149
8 ADVOCACY AND MARKETING ON THE WEB 151
1. Semantics and Register 152
2. Three Elements of Persuasion 153
2.1 Logical argument 154
2.2 Appeal to authority 154
2.3 Emotional appeal 155
2.4 Credibility 155
3. Constructing Persuasive Webtext 156
3.1 Orientation 156
3.2 Information 157
3.3 Action 158
4. What’s a Legitimate Appeal? What’s Not? 158
5. Notes on Propaganda 159
6. Major Types of Propaganda 160
7. Propaganda myths 160
8. Basic Propaganda Devices 162
9. Analyzing Advocacy Websites 164
9 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 165
1. Can I Make Money as a Freelance Writer
on the Web? 165
2. Can I Teach Webwriting? 166
3. Can I Create My Own E-zine? 169
Contents ix
4. Can I Write Hypertext Fiction for the Web? 169
5. Can I Copyright My Webwriting? 170
6. How Do I Cite Web Sources in Scholarly Writing? 171
7. Can a Website Enhance a Book on Paper? 172
8. How Can I Attract Visitors to My Site? 173
9. How Can Writers and Graphic Designers
Work Together? 174
APPENDIX 175
AFTERWORD 177
EXERCISES
1 Assessing Website Structure 34
2 Identifying Exformation 38
3 Reviewing a Website 51
4 Converting Prose to Bullets 52
5 Identifying Clichés 59
6 Activating the Passive 74
7 Using Anglo-Saxon Vocabulary 75
8 Critiquing Corporate Websites 127
9 Reviewing Blogs 142
x Writing for the Web

Sujets

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Informations

Publié par	Self-Counsel Press
Date de parution	15 juillet 2015
Nombre de lectures	4
EAN13	9781770409361
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0025€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Writing for the Web
Kilian Crawford
Self-Counsel Press
(a division of)
International Self-Counsel Press Ltd.
USA Canada

Copyright © 2015

International Self-Counsel Press
All rights reserved.
Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: History, Hypertext, and Interactive Communication

1. Plain Text versus Hypertext

2. The Interactive Communication Model

3. Computers Make Us Impatient

4. Computers Give Us Jolts

5. Computer-Screen Text Is Hard to Read

6. Websites Attract Different Kinds of Visitors

7. Webtext Is Hypertext

Chapter 2: Structuring Your Website

1. Chunking: Hit and Run Information Retrieval

2. Scrolling: Information Retrieval by Downloading

3. The Three Principles of Webtext

Chapter 3: Organizing Website Content

1. Orientation: Navigation Cues Provide a Site Overview

2. Orientation: Headlines

3. Information: Analyze Your Audience — and Yourself!

4. Action: Communication Runs Both Ways

Chapter 4: Writing Good Webtext

1. Activate the Passive

2. Choose Concrete Anglo-Saxon Words

3. Use Simple Sentences

4. Avoid Clichés

5. Choose Strong Verbs over Weak Ones

6. Be Aware of Dialect Variations

7. Be Precise

8. Don’t Use Extended Metaphors

9. Use Clear Antecedents

10. Grammar and Usage: Common Errors

Chapter 5: Editing Webtext

1. Don’t Trust Your Spell Checker

2. Check Your Reading Level

3. Cut Verbiage

4. Critique Your Own Text

5. Print Out to Proofread

6. Don’t Respect the Text!

7. Edit for International Readers

8. A Webwriter’s Style Guide

9. Online Advice about Online Writing Style

Chapter 6: Corporate Webwriting

1. Challenges for Corporate Webwriters

2. Define Your Audience

3. Corporate Webwriting Needs the “You” Attitude

4. Too Many Webwriters Can Spoil the Site

5. Components of Corporate Websites

Chapter 7: Writing for Blogs

1. Personal Blogs

2. Job Blogs

3. Specialist Blogs

4. News Blogs

5. Advocacy Blogs

6. Developing the Right Style for Your Blog

Chapter 8: Advocacy and Marketing on the Web

1. Semantics and Register

2. Three Elements of Persuasion

3. Constructing Persuasive Webtext

4. What’s a Legitimate Appeal? What’s Not?

5. Notes on Propaganda

6. Major Types of Propaganda

7. Propaganda Myths

8. Basic Propaganda Devices

9. Analyzing Advocacy Websites

Chapter 9: Writing for Social Media

1. Social Media and Crowdfunding

2. Advocacy Writing on Twitter

3. Writing for LinkedIn

4. The Ethics of Social Media

Chapter 10: Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can I Make Money as a Freelance Writer on the Web?

2. Can I Teach Webwriting?

3. Can I Create My Own E-zine?

4. Can I Write Hypertext Fiction for the Web?

5. Can I Copyright My Webwriting?

6. How Do I Cite Web Sources in Scholarly Writing?

7. Can a Website Enhance a Book on Paper?

8. How Can I Attract Visitors to My Site?

Appendix

Exercise Key

Afterword

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notice to Readers

Self-Counsel Press thanks you for purchasing this ebook.
Preface

For over 40 years I taught workplace writing, freelance article writing, and how to write commercial fiction. This is my 20th book. So I’m pretty dedicated to print on paper as a medium of communication.
But in the late 1980s I began to see how networked computers were changing the way we communicate. In some ways they were just another means of getting print on paper. But something about the medium itself was changing the nature of our messages — and changing our relationships with the people with whom we communicated. First in email, and then on the newfangled World Wide Web, we were reading, writing, and reacting to information in different ways.
In teaching technology students in the early 1990s, I had to learn fast to stay ahead of them. We were all scrambling to master the new grammar of multimedia: the ways that text and sound and image could combine to express ideas. With few authorities to consult, my students and I watched what we ourselves were doing, and we tried to draw general principles from our experience.
By the mid-1990s the web was truly worldwide, and a whole new industry arose to serve and advance it. I got a sense of how big it was when I walked into a university bookstore and found, by rough estimate, 170 shelf-feet of books about the web: how to master HTML, CGI, and Java; how to use this or that browser; how to design websites; how to research the exponentially growing resources available on the web.
Not one of those books dealt with the actual words to be used on the web.
Well, that made a certain amount of sense. No one had enough experience yet to say what would work on the web, and what wouldn’t. Hypertext had been around in various forms since the 1970s, but it wouldn’t necessarily work on the web the way it does, for example, on an encyclopedia DVD.
So most of the web pioneers wrote in whatever style seemed comfortable, and other pioneers followed their lead. That’s why, in the late 1990s, so many sites had expressions like “Check it out” and “This site under construction.”
By then, creating websites had changed from a self-taught skill into an industry. The pioneers had given countless hours to trial and error (mostly error), in learning the basics of a new technology. But they couldn’t squander their time when clients were paying for it. An obscure computer specialty in 1992 had, by the end of the decade, become almost a basic job skill. My own colleagues, teaching in fields like tourism and business administration, began to wonder how they could cram website design into an already crowded curriculum.
So the time seemed right for a book that might help both expert and novice webwriters save time and avoid known pitfalls. It might thereby help web users as well.
This book doubtless reflects my own biases toward print on paper, but I have tried to learn from a wide range of self-taught pioneer web authorities and to present their views as well as my own. If my arguments make sense and help you write successful text for your sites, of course I’ll be delighted. But I look forward to being rebutted and superseded, because better insights will make webwriting a more effective communication tool for all of us. Some of my arguments may provoke you into articulating contrary views that help to make your sites succeed. If so, this book has succeeded too.
In mastering webwriting, we learn about what goes on in other kinds of writing too, and what goes on in our own minds. So in learning to write well for this medium, I think we learn how to write better in all media, and we learn something about ourselves as well.
Introduction

Twenty-five years after Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first proposal for “a large hypertext database with typed links,” most of us don’t know how we ever got along without the World Wide Web. Yet old habits die hard, and we still use the web with habits acquired in other media.
So newspaper websites still look a lot like newspapers. TV station websites offer lots of video. Business websites look like their ads in the Yellow Pages, only with more colors. And most website creators treat it like whatever medium they’re most familiar with: a sheet of typing paper, a radio, a canvas, a family photo album, or a Rolodex.
Websites can serve all those functions, but one of their primary purposes is to make large amounts of text available online. (The Latin word for “web,” by the way, is textus .) Graphics and sound can enhance the content of a site, but text remains the core.
The web is a very different medium from print, TV, and radio. But the habits we’ve learned in those media influence the way we respond to text on the computer screen. We even call web files “pages” when they’re nothing of the sort.
We read print documents in a certain way, using cues to navigate through a familiar format. The indented first line of a paragraph tells us a new topic is coming up. Page numbers establish a sequence we’re happy to follow. Indexes use alphabetical order to help us find things. We’re so used to these conventions that we don’t even notice them.
But print habits don’t apply on the web. We surf through TV channels with our remote controls, and we bring the same attitude to the TV-like screens of our computers: deliver something interesting right now, some kind of jolt or reward, or we’ll go somewhere else.
These responses demand a kind of writing that is different from other media — not better or worse, just different. Effect