Writing for the Web: Geeks' Edition - Softcover

Kilian, Crawford

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551803038 ISBN 13: 9781551803036

Publisher: UNKNO, 2000

Synopsis

- Write prose as good as your code - Learn how to grab and hold readers attention - Create text for the unique genre of the Web

About this title

About the Author

Crawford Kilian is a veteran of the Internet who has been teaching and writing online since the 1980s. He has twice served as Writer in Electronic Residence for York University and is chair of the Media Technology Division of Capilano Community College in British Columbia, where he teaches how to write interactively for both multimedia and the Web. Kilian is a regular freelance contributor to both print and electronic media.

From the Back Cover

Many an accomplished Web pro thrilled at the prospect of designing an intricate Website trembles at the prospect of writing text for one. Webtext makes specific demands on the writer, and if you re not a professional wordsmith, creating it can be difficult indeed. Writing for the Web: Geeks Edition comes to the aid of those who love code more than they do words, but who know that without text, a Website is just a collection of pretty pictures and special effects.

This book will help you write prose that s as good as your code. It includes a convenient, easy-to-use Webwriter s style guide to step you through the rules governing abbreviations, biased terms, capitalization, compound words, and clichés. Exercises will help you practice your new Webwriting techniques, and critiques of real Websites will give you practical advice.

You will learn how to -- - Adapt content from print to Webtext - Avoid common grammar and usage errors - Develop content for corporate Websites - Edit your material for an international audience

Whether you are creating a personal Website, developing your company s Website, or publishing an e-zine, Writing for the Web: Geeks Edition offers sound advice on writing within the framework of three principles: orient readers to your site; inform readers effectively; and prompt readers to take action so that you get the results you want.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

When early computer users and researchers began to see how they could navigate through electronic information and link one item to another using something called hypertext, they realized that it would offer readers an amazing power and freedom.

If you want to learn about, say, vampires, you face a pretty tedious process if you plan to research the topic using a multi-volume encyclopedia. First you would go to the volume with all the V entries, and find "Vampires." That entry may suggest you also look at entries in other volumes: Transylvania; Dracula; Stoker, Bram; Lugosi, Bela; films, horror; bats, vampire; films, German: Nosferatu. As you consult each of these entries, you re pulling heavy volumes off the shelf and replacing them, making notes, and generally taking up a lot of time.

Even using a single-volume book to research a topic presents challenges. Such a book may have its own hypertext in the form of footnotes, end notes, appendixes, bibliographies, and an index even marginal scribbles by the last reader. The researcher looking for particular information soon learns to read backward: start with the index and then jump to just the pages dealing with the subject of interest. Even then, the follow-up of tracking down footnoted references and finding titles mentioned in the bibliography can be tedious and frustrating.

Hypertext saves you much of that work. Each hypertext document has electronic links to other hypertext documents, much like doors between rooms in a library. If you re reading a hypertext document about horror films and you find a mention of Bela Lugosi, the actor s name can itself be a link to still more information. Instead of making notes, you can simply save the file about Lugosi along with all the other items you ve encountered.

And if you don t want to read about Bela Lugosi, but you do want to read about vampire bats or Transylvanian history, you can ignore the link to the Hollywood star and continue your reading.

This freedom of choice has its attractions, but some hypertext pioneers have tried to make it look like a revolution on a Gutenbergian scale. They claim that, freed from the tyranny of the author s structure, readers can now examine any document they like, in any order they choose, and use the information any way they please. (Of course, readers can also read a print document any way they please, but it takes more effort to jump back and forth in a print-on-paper document than in an electronic document.) If each item of information is small enough, maybe just a paragraph or even a sentence, then readers have even more freedom. Instead of being led like children by the author s hand, readers can now make the text their own property, linking its components in their own preferred way.

This freedom of choice has its limits. If we just want to find out about Bram Stoker, we don t want to waste time on Bela Lugosi, even if the author thinks Lugosi is important. But most of the time, as readers, we expect the author to have mapped out our route for us, just as we expect a travel agent to plan details of our trip. We assume the travel agent knows more than we do and can anticipate our needs. Maybe we want some flexibility built into our itinerary, but we don t want to fly from New York to Paris, back to New York, and then to Frankfurt.

Pushed to a logical extreme, the hypertext author might as well hand the reader a set of Scrabble tiles and say: "Here, make your own text." But that s not authorship, any more than 52 Pickup is a card game. Our readers expect some kind of coherence in our hypertext. We can and should provide such coherence, but we should be aware of some specific challenges in doing so.

Hypertext is by definition nonlinear, but remember that "linearity" itself is just a metaphor for a one-at-a-time sequence -- especially a sequence we re familiar with. The sequence A-B-C is "linear" only because that s the sequence we have learned. So is 1-2-3, and so is subject-verb-object. Because we ve memorized certain patterns, we can expect D to follow C, 3 to follow 2, and verb (usually) to follow subject. When we put information into a numbered sequence, for example, we expect #1 to be more important or more basic than #2, because we re used to hearing important or introductory material before we hear details or complicated material that assumes we understand the basics.

In the rest of this book, I ll examine some of the problems -- and opportunities -- that hypertext offers to you as a Website writer.

As you develop content for your Website, you should bear in mind some basic facts about the medium.

Computer-Screen Text Is Hard to Read

You may not realize it but your monitor has awful resolution. Maybe the text looks crisp and sharp compared to that on those old green-on-black monitors of the mid-1980s. But take a look at your text on-screen and then at a laser printout. Once you look back at your screen, the text will be a sight for sore eyes, and you ll realize how difficult it is to read lots of text on-screen.

Studies in the 1980s, reported by Web analyst and usability advocate Jakob Nielsen, found that reading from a monitor is 25 percent slower than reading from printed paper.

This seems to result from the poor resolution of computer screens, and in 1998, Nielsen was reporting that expensive experimental monitors with very high resolution can bring reading speeds back up to normal. He predicts high-end users will have such screens by 2003, and all users by 2008....

Edition details

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1551803038
• ISBN 13: 9781551803036
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 194