Nielsen on writing styles

By Michael Fraase

Tuesday, 10 June 2008 07:56PM CST

Section: Internet

Leonardo's notebookThe web is not television, we’ve been told over and over. Television, Jakob Nielsen reminds us, is a passive medium. The web, on the other hand, is an active medium. Different mediums require different content styles.

But the web isn’t print either. Nielsen, using an example from the New York Times, argues that the job of print headlines is to draw users into the work by enticing them. On the web, however, the job of a headline is to carry specific information. The online headline alone, Nielsen writes, “must provide enough information scent to let users predict what they’ll get if they follow the link.”

Online writing, according to Nielsen has to be specific, yet comprehensive. Ratings, charts, lists, and graphs are all more useful than narrative online because web content is searchable. Searchability results in the rise of specificity. Rather than providing a narrative about the problems encountered by tall people when traveling, for example, Nielsen maintains that online writing should be actionable: outline which specific flight departing from San Francisco has the best seating configuration for tall people.

A narrative approach on the web, Nielsen says, just gets in the way of users. Leave the storytelling to print.

Brevity is indeed the guiding principle for web writing. Give users the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible and let them move on.

I’m not sure I completely agree with Nielsen on this; or at least I’m hoping for an alternative in the future. Writing for the web is definitely different than writing for print—no argument there. And certain exposition on the web begs for brevity. But I think narrative—especially brief narrative—can work well on the web (take boingboing.net, for instance). And I suspect that as screen technology continues to advance, correspondingly longer narratives will become acceptable.

At least I hope that’s the case. I very much regret the way the web has accelerated the writing—and the reading—process. I look forward to the leisure, considered web that parallels today’s lightning-quick actionable one.

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