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Shorter is better
Given these behavioral facts, the key difference between writing for the Web and writing for offline readers is that web writing needs to be shorter. Documents intended for online reading should rarely be longer than 1,000 words. A good target to aim for is 600 to 700 words. There are many approaches and devices that can help you learn to write more concisely, and an exhaustive review of them is beyond the scope of this guide. But we’ll mention a few.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
This profound rule for keeping your content short comes from the English novelist George Orwell—who also happened to be one of the masters of twentieth-century English (See ORWELL’S RULES, in the A to Z). It is almost magical in its ability to streamline prose and expose rhetorical weakness.

Let’s apply the rule to a newspaper article, picked at random, (from the January 7, 2001, New York Times). The first paragraph of the lead story read:

Washington, Jan. 6 – One thing is already clear about how President-elect George W. Bush intends to govern the nation: state and local officials will have far more leeway to shape and operate the full range of federal social, regulatory, and public works programs.

Applying Orwell’s rule gives this:

Washington, Jan. 6 – One thing is clear about how George W. Bush intends to govern: state and local officials will have more leeway to shape and operate federal social, regulatory, and public works programs.

That takes the excerpt from 40 to 31 words—a 23 percent decrease without affecting its content.

This rule can be extended to cover phrases, sentences, and thoughts, as well as words. Once you’ve completed a draft of your content, read it again, asking yourself as you go along: “Is there superfluous information here?” and “Could these details be cut?”

A similar rule is embodied in the phrase “kill your darlings” by William Faulkner. Or as Samuel Johnson put it, “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” This sounds like suicidal advice but it makes a lot of sense. Often we fall in love with pet phrases or words. Subconsciously, we tend to write sentences that allow us to use them. This is not a good idea because it takes the writer away from the reason they sat down to write in the first place: to communicate something useful. Which brings us to a golden rule …

Write for the reader, not for your ego
It’s easy to just write and write, with no particular reader in mind. The problem with this sort of writing is that nobody reads it. Always keep the reader in mind when writing. Think of them as busy, impatient people who are on the Web to find out something.

Question your modifiers
One of the characteristics of bad writing is its overuse of adjectives and adverbs. They add to the length of an article and also tend to slow its pace. When you look at them a second time, you often find they are disguising weak nouns and verbs. Think about the sentence, “He hit it really hard,” then compare it with “He clobbered it.”


Next: Be direct
Previous: Writing for the Web is different

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