Overview: Writing content

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."