Good Article Writing – Keep It Short and Sweet

Good Article Writing – Keep It Short and Sweet

Writing for the internet is way different than writing for a huge printed publication. There are so many choices for internet consumers these days that you really need to make your writing pop; you need to make it punchy and most of all you need to make it brief. Web surfers tend to just skim through articles or even article topics to glean the information they’re seeking. No one wants to spend excess time reading through loads and loads of information that might not apply. If you want to get your point across, you can’t change this behavior, you have to adapt to it.

If you want some proof, surveys show that people find it more difficult to read when online. Even the best readers read 25% from their computer screens than from the paper that is in their hand. Couple this fact with the short attention spans of most internet users and your college essay writing skills are tossed completely out the window. The basics still do apply; you need to write with correct grammar and punctuation as well as writing in complete sentences. But everything else will need some rehabbing.

As an example, the paragraph you just read is almost too long to be viable for online use. The paragraphs you write need to be short and punchy; they need to grab the reader’s attention for the 30 seconds that you have it. You need to unlearn the six sentence rule about paragraphs. As few as three and no more than five is what you need to keep the reader from getting bored.

The ideas about effective web writing go back at least 10 years and maybe even more. A former engineer for Sun Microsystems who is now a user advocate and has 79 US patents has actually written a number of articles about the subject. He frequently talks about exactly how users tend to use the internet on his web site and this has a direct bearing on the way you should write. Some of the ideas explained here are actually drawn from his work. There are numerous others on the internet who share similar ideas.

One such idea is the pyramid and inverted pyramid writing styles, ever heard of it? Well, in the pyramid writing style you would slowly build your way from the basics to the more advanced ideas; this is largely academic and is how most textbooks are written. The reverse pyramid is just as it sounds a reversing of the concept by starting with bold ideas and statements and then explaining your way down to the basics.

The pyramid style is great for students and scientists, but the style of writing that would appeal to most internet surfers is the reverse pyramid. This is the style of writing that journalists use; they put all who’s, what’s, when’s, where’s, how’s and why’s right at the beginning in a short summary and then fill in the information in the rest of the article.