Overview: Writing content

“If you are not calling out sections of your web pages or prose on those pages with subheads, you are making a big mistake!” write Pernice et al. “If you take nothing else [away], please take this: Use subheads and subsubheads.”

Take a tip from the Times. Write headlines that: Average 8 or 9 words Never grow longer than 14 words Sometimes have as few as four words

Clarity, not creativity, is the backbone of good UX writing. Choose simple words and craft shorter sentences. Explain acronyms users might not know. Use proper punctuation. Be extra careful about things like cleverness, wordplay, and idioms that might affect usability. Above all, write to be understood.

Probably my biggest frustrations ... is the utter contempt they seem to hold content in. ... they won’t hire a professional copywriter to work on the content ... never teach content creators how to create appropriate web content.

Don’t start with the blah blah blah

Imperative voice gets shared. Imperative voice boosts email click, open and read rates.

"Users rarely read an entire webpage. That means you need to adopt a different style when writing for the web. A style that accommodates this lack of attention."

Want a handy list of the core Clean Language questions? Here goes:

"understand the digital reader’s brain, and to get a couple of concrete writing tips for your next digital text." "Nothing can surpass a text when it comes to transforming abstract thoughts into concrete expression."

The “known-new contract” is a linguistic concept used to describe how writers achieve cohesion between sentences by first presenting what readers already know (information previously presented) before introducing new information.

"If you can write a half decent document you may be mistaken for thinking writing for the web will be easy. However, the web requires a focus of writing rarely needed elsewhere."

The Europa Web Guide is the official rulebook for the European Commission's web presence, covering editorial, legal, technical, visual and contractual aspects. All European Commission web sites must observe the rules and guidelines it contains. Web practitioners are invited to observe its contents and keep abreast of updates.

Quick accessibility checklist (by European Commission)

Writing tips from "Writing for the European Commission web presence"

From now, house style guide recommends terms such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’

Gerry McGovern on skills needed for digital communication people. For example: - choose the right word to drive action; - make it easy finding content allowing users to complete a task quickly; - design for maintenance and evolution; - love metadata, be an information architect. I wished I had all of those.

People do not read online: "fundamental scanning behaviors remain constant, even as designs change."

"The Huffington Post is the third most popular online news site, after only Yahoo! News and Google News. They must be doing something right!"

"Plain Language For Everyone, Even Experts" (video)

Chunking is a concept where text and multimedia content is broken up into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.

Cheap storage. Cheap processing power. Cheap energy. It’s all great. We don’t have to think. We just dump our content onto the website and let search engines figure it out.

Reading long sentences (online), your readers not only don’t know what they’ve read, they also forget where they parked the car. Write short sentences like the Times.

Precise communication in a handful of words? The editors at BBC News achieve it every day, offering remarkable headline usability.

"A link is a promise. A menu is a selection of promises. Without the link there is no Web."

4 Steps to communicate anything clearly, according to a scientist who teaches quantum physics to kids

Choose ‘fluent’ words - short, simple, easy-to-pronounce terms

Online writing - use more lists, use them bullets, use this template. "People love listicles. Lists get attention, reach skimmers and scanners, get remembered and shared."