Defining Webwriting

François Hubert, who runs the excellent French-language site Cortexte, is planning to teach a course in Webwriting and wants to offer his students a definition of the subject. Did I have one?

Well, that was a good question. I didn't want to spoil it with a quick answer. So after some thought, here's a tentative definition:

Webwriting is good writing adapted to the limits of the Web as a medium and to the needs of Web users.

OK, that's the one-liner. Now let me expand on what I just said. "Good writing," by my definition, is plain text that does not usually call attention to itself. Orwell called it "transparent writing," text that lets you see the subject without even noticing the words that convey it.

In fact, if you notice the elegant style, the similes as aromatic as fried shoes, the stuttering staccato of alliteration, then it's not good writing. It's just the writer showing off how cool he thinks he is.

This is a philosophy of writing, not a scientific law, and if your idea of literary heaven is mainlining on the high-calorie prose of Cormac McCarthy, I wish you every joy of him. But I aspire to Orwell's clarity.

Dumbed down, revved up
Such clarity is especially helpful on the Web, which has some severe limits as a medium. Text on a computer screen dumbs us down and revs us up. Low resolution dumbs us down by reducing our reading speed to around 75% of our print-reading speed. So unless we want to waste our readers' time, we should try to say in 75 words what we'd normally say in 100.

Meanwhile, the jolts delivered by the computer rev us up. Hit a key, get a beep. Click the mouse, and a window opens up. Read your email, get an adrenaline rush from your sweetie or your favourite flamer. Write back, get another rush. Apart from the addictive nature of online discourse, the medium also encourages impatience. We want that beep or that flame right now, not one second from now.

So text designed to be read on the screen needs to be concise. Sentences need to be short. Paragraphs too: a paragraph of more than six or seven lines is fine on paper, but on the screen it's unreadable.

Does that mean dumbing down the text altogether? No. Run the Book of Ecclesiastes through a style checker, and you'll find that a third-grader can read it...but generations of scholars have wrestled with its meaning.

Help your readers navigate
Once you've made your point in the fewest possible words, you need to help your impatient reader to find it. Web users tend to scan around a new site, something like the way paper readers skim the headlines before settling on a story. Navigation aids are crucial. A subhead every few paragraphs is one such aid.

You should think about your readers' needs in other ways as well. For one thing, they're not all "readers." A Web reader is content to scroll down a long text, or to download it and read it as the Lord intended, as print on paper, while drinking a beer and eating pretzels.

A Web user, by contrast, is a hit & run specialist: get to the site, find the information, download it, and disappear. Users want really easy navigation and equally easy access to information, which they plan to use in some information structure of their own.

Web viewers are refugees from TV. They're looking for visual stimulation more than text. They like the jolts they get from stuff that jumps around on the screen. For them, your text may need to be spoken in a streaming video or audio.

Web listeners include everyone from the visually impaired to people who want to know what's playing on Manila's pop radio stations. This is still a relatively small group, but I sense that it's growing.

Finally we have the Web talkers, a group identified for me by my Brazilian student Luís Filidis. They're not just passive absorbers of other people's information.These are the people who want to dish out some real jolts of their own, whether by building their own blogs or by posting responses on other people's sites. They're what make this a truly interactive medium.

I doubt that many sites could meet the needs of all these groups. But if we're aware of the needs of the groups we really want to reach, we're more likely to succeed. This is one reason why I love this medium: it doesn't belong to the self-absorbed people with technical skills but no interest in others. It belongs to the people who can sit at a keyboard, stare into a low-resolution screen, and look straight into the hearts of their readers.

Comments

[David Rosam]

What a great piece.

I agree with almost every word - particularly the idea that great writing doesn't call attention to itself.

Absolutely!