Digital Media

Many of the same principles of writing for the newspaper that I think about daily at work are relevant to writing for the Web. There are several similarities between Web readers and newspaper readers. Web readers are scanning to find the information they want. While newspaper readers are probably not as focused about what they are looking for, they too want to get the day’s news and information as efficiently as possible.  

 An inverted pyramid style of writing allows readers to read the most important information in the story at the beginning and then determine how far they will continue to read. This can be combined with what Nathan Wallace calls multi-level writing on the Web to make pages easy to scan. It’s very tempting, and sometimes necessary, to post stories that are printed in the paper onto the Web without thinking about the ways that readability can be improved on the Web. While this would probably be too much work for a newspaper in which content changes daily, there are some aspects of multi-level writing that would be practical to implement.

For example, the reporter could make an alternate first sentence if the first sentence in the printed newspaper does not make for a good summary sentence. They can also break up text by adding informative subheads, which can help readers who are scanning the article. Bulleted lists would also scanners find information easily.

 I’m an expert at cutting stories down to their essence. This is important for Web writing because readers aren’t looking for a lot of unnecessary information. They want every word and every sentence to contribute to the focus of the story. This is important to remember because, unlike when I am writing for print, on the Web I have an unlimited amount of space in which to write. However, my readers do not have unlimited attention spans.

 George Klare’s readability principles were a good reminder that a writer must think about who will be reading the material and write appropriately for that group. You don’t want to have a site that targets patients and then use a lot of medical jargon in the material. On the other hand, doctors will expect what they are reading to use terms correctly and to have the results of research backed up by the methodology.

 Discussion Questions:

1. What makes a page easy to scan on the Web?
2. How can long, narrative pieces be made more readable on the Web?
3. How can you test for readability?