Writing for the Web

Welcome to the Yahoo style guide

Via Techvibes.com, a post by Knowlton Thomas: Yahoo launches style guide for web writing. Excerpt:

Yahoo has just launched a style guide for online content, available in parts online, and in full, ironically to some extent, in print. I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't been done before, given how woefully slow all the standard style guides have adapted to online writing. (The ubiquitous AP Style Guide only recently changed "Web site" to "website," but still prefers "smart phone.")

The hyperlink war

In Salon.com, Laura Miller joins the growing discussion over where to put the links: The hyperlink war. Excerpt:

Because I cover the antediluvian communication technology known as the book, I rarely get mixed up in the ongoing, pundit-driven conversation about the Nature of the Internet. Actually, "conversation" hardly seems the right word for what's largely a symphony of prognostication, thumb-sucking, posturing and enough grandiose shade-throwing to make the drag-ball competitions of "Paris Is Burning" look as sedate as a council session of the EU. 

However, inspired by Nicholas Carr's new book, "The Shallows," and the feedback of Salon readers, I've lately been experimenting with a departure from standard Web practice. I'm refraining from including hyperlinks to relevant sources in the text of my articles and instead collecting them in a paragraph at the end of each piece. Carr's book refers to several studies indicating that people who read texts containing embedded hyperlinks comprehend and remember less of what they read than people reading plain text. 

As a front-page story in the New York Times confirmed on Monday, many regular Internet users are complaining of a growing inability to concentrate, and they, too, blame the siren song of technological distraction. If putting links at the end of my articles instead of installing them in the text makes reading a little bit easier or more pleasant for my own readers (and the majority of them say it does), then it seems worth a shot.

Read the whole story to find the links, which you can then ignore if you like.

I will sound ungracious, but Ms. Miller's writing style is a worse problem than her links. The sentences and paragraphs are just too long.

Should we de-link hypertext?

A colleague sent me the link to an interesting post that disapproves (sort of) of links: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Experiments in delinkification. Excerpt:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they're also distractions. Sometimes, they're big distractions - we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we've forgotten what we'd started out to do or to read. 

Other times, they're tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. 

You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it's there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension. 

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it. 

I don't want to overstate the cognitive penalty produced by the hyperlink (or understate the link's allure and usefulness), but the penalty seems to be real, and we should be aware of it.

I've put Rough Type in the list of Webwriting Resources.

In my writing for The Tyee, I make a point of including hyperlinks to enrich the text, to give readers an extra dimension of information. (The link will take you to an example.)

And I increasingly find footnotes in print text to be "more violent": those tiny little superscript numbers tell me the real information is buried in the back of the book, but I'm too lazy to keep flipping back and forth. If I did flip to the back of the book, I'd find a reference to an unobtainable book or article—or to a URL that I would have to painstakingly type in to my computer. 

Talk about giving yourself a yank! By comparison, clicking through to a link is both easy and easily reversible—at least if the new material pops up in a new window, and the original item has some intrinsic interest to the reader.

Case in point: When I clicked through to Rough Type and started reading, I knew I was dealing with good stuff. I explored the site a little, made a link to it for Webwriting Resources, and went back to my colleague's email to thank him for letting me know about Nicholas Carr. I didn't wander off into the World Wide Labyrinth.

And now here I am, blogging about him and planning to spend more time exploring his site—wherever the hell he wants to put his links. Nicholas Carr is a guy worth knowing.