What impression are you trying to create? Are you just giving information, or do you want your readers to do something? Who is your audience? Who will read your writing? Think about these groups, what interests them and what you want to say to them. How do they like to receive and use information? Is the visual impact important to them or not?
Inverted pyramid writing
Most people are taught to write by setting up a proposition, building an argument and coming to a conclusion.
However, this presupposes that your reader has the time to read your content all the way through to the end. However, most people skim and scan text in order to extract the salient points as quickly as possible.
Journalists and web editors recognise that their readership is transient and have adopted the concept of inverted pyramid writing to communicate with a time-poor audience.
This style places the most newsworthy information at the beginning of the story and orders the remaining content based on relative importance.
- Story lead (who, what, why, where, when) > Supporting information > Details
Writing for the web
People don’t read websites in the same way as they read books or newspapers. They tend to scan, looking for the information they want, and ignore long documents and large blocks of text. You can make it easier for your users by following a few simple pointers:
- Put the most important information at the top of the page
- Use sub-headings, bullet lists and links, so people can find topics easily
- Use plain English and avoid jargon (remember, you are writing for everyone, including people whose first language may not be English)
- Keep it brief – internet users like short bites of text
- Keep pages short – don’t make people scroll down too far on any page.
- Use short sentences
- Make sure your content is relevant – do I really need to include this?
