Writing for the Web

Books about Webwriting

I've added a list of books on Webwriting at the bottom of the left-hand column. Three of them are mentioned in a review I posted here earlier.

The TypeLists are another very agreeable aspect of TypePad. I also like the Stats, which enable me to see who's been visiting and then to return the visit. Especially pleased to see all the brasileiros and brasileiras here. They're doing fascinating things on Brazilian Websites, and we should be spending more time with each other.

Metablogging...

...that is, talking about blogging instead of actually doing it.

I've been visiting lots of blogs in the past few months, some of them repeatedly. It's fascinating to see the conventions emerging in the different genres.

The major genre might be called the introvert blog--it's all about the author's personal life. One of the striking aspects of this genre is the author's denigration of himself: the blog is purported to be "chaos," "random," "neurotic," and generally reflective of a failed life.

More from Brazil

TP lets you check your stats, which include the URLs of your visitors. That's how I learned that a Brazilian with the unlikely name of Nemo Nox had visited here early in the month and had then mentioned it in his own blog.

I wrote to say "muito obrigado," and asked him if he had any more Brazilian Webwriting links. Well, he did, including three books on Webwriting--two of which he didn't care for--and he also gave me the links to three of his own articles on blogging.

The recommended book is "Como escrever na Rede," by Leonardo Moura (Editora Record), which you can buy online.

And Nemo's articles are as follows:

Os escribas estão soltos
Da crônica ao metajornalismo
Colônias temáticas e comportamento emergente

Um forte abraço, Nemo, and send me more news from Brazil!

Web or web? E-mail or email?

At this late date we all ought to agree on some basic Web usage, but we don't. I'm not sure I even agree with myself.

The Value of Webwriting

Mercedes Sanchez, whose site is listed in the left-hand column, recently wrote to me with a concern that I share—and want to share with you. She wrote:

I subscribe to some discussion lists here in Brazil about the Web and I can't participate as I would wish, but one thing I noticed (and that drives me mad) is that Web content is not valorized.

People who work with the Web are still much more worried about technology and business and they think content is some kind of luxury or not an important thing. Last week, on a list about intranets, I said that an editor would be important on the process and the coments that came back made me feel like an ET.

An editor? For what? Are you crazy? The intranet is for the employees and they know what they want, what they need, so they can put the content by themselves! Intranet is for business and work can't be centralized, so you can't have an editor!

Will Blogging Change the World?

BBC News Online has an article today, "A Blog for Everyone" that's worth reading. The blogging phenomenon isn't exactly new (though I'm a newcomer to it), and its general direction seems clear: Most blogs, like most novels, most news stories, and most love letters, are pretty bad. This always happens when a medium becomes accessible to a whole new population with not much experience or training; books are still recovering from Gutenberg, after all, so we can't expect blogs (or any other kind of Web writing) to acquire much prestige for a few more centuries.

But among the self-indulgent bloggers we already find some who are doing interesting and useful things. I'll try to list some in the next few days. I may not agree with what they say or their reasons for saying it, but I like good writing that's suited to its medium.

Whitewater Editing for the Web

When technologies and audiences change before our eyes, editing is rarely a task performed in tranquil contemplation of eternal truths, using style guides carved in stone. Instead we try to adapt our skills to new media, for audiences we scarcely know, and our only constant is the knowledge that tomorrow we'll probably have to adapt yet again. This is whitewater editing.

When it comes to adapting print text to Websites, we may be tempted to recall that an "editor" was originally a sponsor of gladiatorial games in ancient Rome. So why not just hack and slash and hope for the best?

Why not? Because you won't end up with the best--just a gory mess on the floor and thousands of downturned thumbs.

It doesn't have to be that way. When they dump a mass of brochures, reports, and articles on your desk and say, "Put this on the site, would you?", you can do a better job than you think.

How the Web is Changing English

As a novelist, I know that you show the truth about your characters by putting them under stress that threatens their identity. As a writer and editor, I know that nothing stresses writers and editors more than confronting issues around "bad English," "improper usage," and sloppy punctuation.

Such confrontations usually happen in private when the editor and writer lock in deadly embrace over a stray semicolon or whether it's all right to write "alright." But the Internet has brought these quarrels out into public scrutiny. America and Britain, Oscar Wilde once observed, are two great nations divided by the same language. Now the division affects the whole English world, and countless foreign countries as well.

Three Books on Webwriting

Every verbal text – spoken or written, print or electronic – has a nonverbal subtext. If it agrees with the text, the subtext powerfully enhances the text. If it disagrees, subtext subverts the verbal message.

Print books on how to write for the Web would seem to subvert themselves without even being read. If writing for the Web is worth doing, why produce a book in the first place? Why not just a Web site?

For a very good reason: the Web is an alternative to the book, not a replacement. Three recent books deal in various ways with writing Web text, and each has a subtext worth heeding as well – if only to reject it.

Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability (New Riders Publishing, 2000) is as much brick as book: printed on thick, glossy paper, it’s surprisingly heavy. But his subtext largely dismisses text itself. He devotes only a few pages to guidelines on writing – perhaps 15 pages out of almost 400. The subtext here is that writing merits only about 4 percent of a Web designer’s time and attention.

Starting from Scratch

Adapting print text to the Web is a complicated business that I'll deal with another time. But suppose you decide to create text specifically for the Web. Maybe you know what you should say, because the information is also available in print, but you’re not going to revise a news release or report and then transcribe to the screen. You’re starting from scratch. How do you go about it?

I usually try not to say what goes without saying, but consider your visitors and how you can serve them. “Serve” is the word--not “tell” or “sell” or “persuade” or even “inform.” If your site can’t help your visitors in some way that they value, your site has no reason to exist.