3b Basics of writing for the Web

Use an ‘inverted pyramid’ style of writing:

• Start with a headline which summarises the information
• Follow with a few sentences which present the most significant details which support the summary headline
• End with the less important facts

Put the most important information first in links, titles, and phrases

• This will emphasise the uniqueness of the item and aid quick comprehension

Remove excess words and avoid big words where smaller more everyday words would do the same job, for example:

• 'Come into possession of’ becomes 'Get'
• 'Unostentatious' becomes 'Simple'

Use specialist language and jargon only when it is well known by your audience:

• Modify the internal language used by your organisation into everyday language
• ‘Unemployment benefit’ becomes ‘dole’
• ‘Community engagement’ becomes ‘getting people involved’
• ‘stakeholder engagement’ becomes ‘talking to people’
• ‘benchmarking’ becomes ‘measuring’
• Test with people: Where possible, test the language you are using for everyday understanding with the people who need to read it

Use the active rather than the passive voice

• The active voice is less wordy, more direct and easier to understand (see notes below and the references for more on this)

Use an appropriate style of writing to match the content and the audience

• In some cases an informal, friendly, personal style may be more effective than formal language

Use short sentences and short focused paragraphs:

• Try to keep sentences below 21 words
• Try to keep paragraphs below 6 sentences and focused on a single topic

Make liberal use of bullet lists and numbered lists to aid quick visual scanning of content

• Change long comma separated lists into bullet points

Add relevant tables and diagrams to break up blocks of text

Emphasise key words and phrases

• Do not make large passages bold or italic, as:
  • It is more difficult to read
  • It loses the emphasis if overused
• CODE:Use <strong>and <em> rather than <B> and <i> or CSS <span> to add semantic meaning

Do not use ALL CAPS, underlining, right, centre or justified alignment for body text [see 1c]