TwoLittleFishes Web design blog

Concise text and short paragraphs

When writing Web site content you should usually use around half the number of words you would normally use.

Steve Krug in his book Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability goes as far as saying:

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.

If people only scan Web pages, then most of what you write won’t be read. So why bother writing it?

Writing less means that only the valuable information is left and doesn’t get drowned out with useless noise.

Writing less

The first thing to remove is the filler text, the kind of thing that doesn’t really need to be there, but fills up empty space. On a portfolio page, do we really need

Here are some of the Web sites I’ve designed or developed lately.

It’s not as though our portfolio page is going to promote someone else’s work, so it’s just filler text.

The next thing is to remove redundant words:

• Don’t say the same thing twice (e.g. past history, careful consideration);
• Use 1 word instead of 2 (e.g. merge together, ongoing plan);
• Use 1 word instead of a phrase (e.g. apply instead of make an application)

We often try to use more words to impress people and make them think we are clever, but we impress them more when we are clear and concise.

Short paragraphs

Use 1 subject per paragraph.

The first 2 words should be important information carrying words so that readers scanning the text quickly know if the paragraph contains what they are looking for.

Short paragraphs break up the text better, allow white space and don’t give the reader a solid wall of text that’s hard to read. Shorter paragraphs are also easier to understand because people don’t have to process as much information.

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Tags: Valuable content, Writing for the Web

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Writing for the Web.