Effective Web Writing
By Crawford Kilian
Several years ago, I stood in a university bookstore and counted at least 170 shelf-feet of books about the Web: books about HTML, CGI, and Java; books about Perl and Web site administration. Not one book was about the text that all those tools were supposed to display. And although every one of those books could have been archived on a Web site, in practice the Web-creator market wanted print on paper.
That made sense. The Web is a pretty lousy way to transmit information—especially the text that gives the Web its chief reason for existence. But you can use writing techniques to exploit the Web's strengths while avoiding its weaknesses.
Let's start with the weaknesses. Reading text on a monitor is physically tiring and unpleasant. Intellectually, it's truly dangerous. Computers rev us up and dumb us down, leaving us in no frame of mind for logical thought or analysis.
They rev us up by conditioning us for jolts. A jolt is a sensory and emotional reward that follows a prescribed action. Turn on the machine and it boings at you. Click on an icon and a window opens up, delivering a jolt. Type a flame to your favorite adversary, and he'll send you back a jolt as repayment.
Like Pavlov's dogs, we're now conditioned to expect such stimuli. Addicted, we develop a tolerance and soon need more and bigger jolts to feed our habit. We grow impatient if a site loads slowly, or if we can't find what we're looking for—the jolt of useful information, a pretty graphic, or a funny noise. We demand faster connections because we need faster jolts.<>
