Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
November/December 2002

Meeting Report: September 2002

by Bill Ardis
EBSTC Member

The Ron Person Performance Piece:
Writing for the Web – Effectively

Ron Person, a West Coast writer with deep development and book-authoring expertise, kicked off the EBSTC’s fall season—and this made the kickoff a heckuva lot better than Friends and Bob’s Your Uncle (or whatever the current popular sitcom is). In a program packed with ideas and entertainment—and chocolate for those who paid close attention—Ron gave us a thrill-ride through the thicket of notions regarding how learning is best accomplished on the Web.

Screen-to-Brain Learning

If you write for the Web, the task requires “a structure and style that help the reader find what they need and then read it quickly.” On the Web, if the data are not readily available, or the means to get the data are not clear—bye-bye readers, they’re gone.

What follows is a summary of Ron’s ideas from his presentation.

Readers Need Context

Establishing context enables the reader to find personal relevance, a critical factor in adult learning. A seminar provider for software help developers studied how 16 people used Help when filling out an online conference registration form. The only registrants who completed the registration were those who had received an overview (context) before beginning the procedure.

Significantly Increasing Web Usability

Sun Microsystems’ Science Office rewrote two white papers using different structures and writing styles. They found that 80% of readers scanned text on the Web—and that reading from a computer screen was 25 percent slower. A few of Sun’s usability guidelines:

Segment documents into multiple pages.
Reduce word count by 50 percent.
Write links as phrases that clearly and briefly describe the linked content.
Use bulleted or enumerated lists.

Satisfying the Online News Junkie

Poynter Institute studies how people read newspapers. After reviewing data from hundreds of pages read by volunteers, the Institute created guidelines now followed by many online newspapers. A few of the Poynter Institute’s guidelines are:

Readers’ eyes first move to text, then to graphics.
Text is skimmed before it is read.
News readers scan shallowly, but widely.
Short, descriptive headlines are critically important.
Briefs are read three times more frequently than in-depth articles.
In most articles, only the first line or two are read.
Readers rarely read more than 75 percent of the way into an article.

Conclusions

While Web page designs may vary, there are certain development guidelines to be followed to communicate quickly and easily with the reader. A few of these guidelines:

Main page or search-result page

Use narrow columns of 45 to 55 characters for faster scanning.
Position headlines in a narrow column.

Headlines

Write short, descriptive headlines.
Link headlines on the main page to detailed content.

Briefs

Follow headlines on the main page with briefs.
Briefs are one to three summary lines.

Articles—detailed content

Write in an inverted pyramid style.
Use a wide column of approximately 100 characters for faster detailed reading.
Write with a restricted vocabulary.
Write with restricted, simple grammar.
Use simple sentences.
Put the conclusion first in the article.
Put the topic sentence first in a paragraph.
One paragraph should contain one idea.
Sentences should have 20 or fewer words.
Paragraphs should have 5 or fewer sentences.
Use bullets or enumerated lists.

Resources

Writing for the Web
Poynter Institute
National Cancer Institute
WinWriters
Usable Web

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